Call Up the Waters: A Brief Book Review

18 Sep, 2023

First published at Walking the Wire (Substack) on 17 September 2023.

Oddly enough, Amber Caron’s book of short stories, Call Up the Waters, has me thinking about superhero spectacles.¹

It’s not that Caron’s tales are filled with grand deeds or feats, miraculous rescues or inspirational accounts of challenges overcome. It’s quite the opposite, in fact: there’s almost nothing here but the moment-by-moment of everyday life, whatever that might mean, whether in harsh environments or bland ones. In Caron’s stories, the drama lies not in the magnificence or show(iness) of the events or characters themselves, but in masterfully understated storytelling that somehow brings out the full tension, suspense, even low-grade terror, of the implications or results of the choices any of us could probably see ourselves making, or trying to make. Yes, one story is set among mushers; another involves the aftermath of a search-and-rescuer’s house having slid down a cliff. But in none of these tales, even the one where a mother fears her daughter’s gone missing or worse, does the action center upon the details of the Big Traumatic Event itself, if those particulars even get mentioned at all. A teenage niece prone to running away, a poverty-stricken thirteen-year-old essentially having to tend her drunken father on her birthday, a new-in-town high schooler dealing both with the death of a popular boy and the unwelcome advances he’d made: the draw and the details are often in the mental and emotional reflection or wrangling we’re let in on—the wondering how the protagonist will handle this believable situation, and for many of us, the eerie familiarity of having experienced similar emotional circumstances, even if we’ve never even seen a sled dog, dowsed for water, or had our homes disappear into an abyss.

There’s something in it all related to historian Timothy Snyder’s question about our willingness and ability to see through various modes of paralyzing political mythologies: “Do we understand that being an individual requires a constant consideration of endless factuality, a constant selection among many irreducible passions?”² Something like that constant consideration of endless factuality is going on here—a quiet consideration that stands in stark contrast to the sort of worn-out superhero blockbusters that keep getting remade, in ever more glaring and blaring fashion, and that apparently keep drawing audiences to their presentation of explosions, absurdly ripped bodies, schlocky soundtracks, and characters whose attitudes and actions fall easily on either side of a clearly delineated boundary between passions reduced to good and bad, in service to a giant problem that drowns out what we tend to think of as the obscure details that form the texture and even direction of our daily lives.³

Immersing yourself in this sort of over-the-top superhero universe does, of course, take you out of that endless factuality: the snarky coworker, the hours’ worth of back-and-forth spent trying to resolve an insurance charge, the frequent uselessness of reaching out to your elected representatives.⁴ Because in this alternate universe, there are only huge problems that only a superhuman can solve; it’s out of our hands, and there’s nothing we little people should or even could possibly do but just sit back and watch and be grateful not only that a demigod has stepped up to save us, but that said being has also provided a lot of fireworks and aggressive bombast to entertain us while doing so. And in the face of all this waiting around and watching the sparks fly, we also get to—have to, if we’re to experience the full magic—check out from worrying about or attending to those smaller daily frustrations that seem petty or worse, meaninglessly boring and unamenable to a quick fix, when compared to all this grandiosity.⁵

Obviously, reading Amber Caron’s dilemmas of “small” life won’t on its own launch us into civic, or even private, responsibility toward each other or toward our own existence. But in refusing to ignore the ways in which we destroy or uplift ourselves through unglamorous decisions—the ways in which we might, if we’re lucky, learn to grow up—she at least offers us some means of trying to look at what we’re doing and what we’re facing, and how we might think about how to approach it all. And she does it while also making clear that there’s also no magic bullet for anything, no bag of tricks to pull out, and that any way of trying to solve a problem or get out of a situation we don’t like, for one reason or another, will be hard, even if there are plenty of pleasant or joyous moments to be had throughout: hard to decide what to do or how to proceed, hard to follow through, hard to keep ourselves and others accountable, hard to face up to when things don’t or won’t turn out as we’d hoped, hard to endure the fact that no one will cheer us on or even watch our struggle, and hard to accept that so-called closure may never come. Hard to accept settling or compromising, or figuring out where you go from there when you do. Maybe what I’m trying to get at is that Caron’s stories seem to carry within them a striving toward, or at least recognition of, individual responsibility for oneself and others, within a very confusing, ever-changing world in which we can’t escape the fact that our decisions and even our feelings cannot but affect each other.

It’s probably too grand a claim to make—the collection is not in any way, after all, a set of political or moral admonitions—but it feels as if Caron’s characters and the situations they’re dealing with not only ask the same question Snyder does, but acknowledge, even work with on a maybe-reduced scale, the statement he makes after asking it: “The virtue of individualism becomes visible in the throes of our moment, but it will abide only if we see history and ourselves within it, and accept our share of responsibility.”⁶ Key to that statement is what Caron so often portrays, or shows her characters in the process of trying to achieve: the ability to see ourselves, accurately, where we are—the surroundings we’re in, the people and beings and objects and developments within them—without any decoration or fanfare that could make us feel better about it or ourselves. And to act, or at least do our best to behave like, responsible individuals who depend, like it or not and always imperfectly, on each other.

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^{1. Amber Caron, Call Up the Waters (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2023).↩}

^{2. Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), 35.↩}

^{3. Sure, sure, Wolverine was grouchy and sort of antisocial, and Spider Man lost his powers one time, but they both bucked up and gave evil the one-two punch. From what I remember, Wolverine just kept on being a lovably dysfunctional loner with whom it’d be nearly impossible to maintain any real-life relationship; Spider Man could’ve gone on to a career of life coaching after simply realizing he had to believe in himself in order to do his superhero thing.↩}

^{4. For example, recent phone tags with my alderperson, who has no other way of being contacted, just sort of petered out; the letter I sent to one of my representatives did result in a form-letter response—but one that had nothing to do with what I was asking about. This pattern has been typical of every place I’ve lived, and every politician who’s represented me; no wonder this form of civic engagement feels like a tiresome charade.↩}

^{5. It’s not that some grand governmental cabal has launched all this big entertainment upon us so that we’ll stay quiet and drooling into our Big Gulps while the overlords go about planning our lives—but it does feel related to Noam Chomsky’s observations decades ago about sports and daytime talk shows and such, and the way that a great deal of entertainment does nothing to lessen our ignorance or disconnection from each other. You can see a bit of that discussion in the clip featured in Russell McCutcheon’s post “Why Am I Cheering for My Team?”, where Chomsky asserts that the purpose of certain “media is just to dull people’s brains.” He admits that “This is an oversimplification,” but that it would seem that such products often serve to “get [people] away from things that matter… It offers something for people to pay attention to that’s of no importance, that keeps them from worrying about … things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea about doing something about.” Culture on the Edge, January 17, 2014, https://edge.ua.edu/russell-mccutcheon/why-am-i-cheering-for-my-team/↩}

^{6. Snyder, 35.↩}

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