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Going Under
By RACHEL NOLAN
WATERLINE
By Ross Raisin
262 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $14.99.
Mick Little, the graying former shipbuilder at the center of Ross Raisin’s second novel, “Waterline,” is not a terribly remarkable man. His wife has died in middle age — she’s “copped her whack,” in the parlance of his part of Scotland — but he’s hardly alone in that. The Clydebank cemetery is full of laid-off shipyard workers and their wives and children. Mick remembers sealing hulls with asbestos, packing it into snowballs to throw at his pals, then shaking the dried powder from his trousers for his wife to clean. Most likely he brought her mesothelioma home from work, a fact that provides him with gnawing survivor’s guilt and “a wee conversational stumbling block” when it comes to the rest of the family.
After her wake, when the in-laws and sons have cleared out of the house, Mick lights on a banal idea: “You keep on. What else can you do? You keep on.” But in an extraordinary twist, Mick does not keep on. Instead, he unwinds his life.
He mostly stops eating, he doesn’t work or collect the dole or file for damages, he speaks to no one, he can no longer bear the house he shared with his wife, her toothbrush in the upstairs bathroom “dried out now as a thistle.” He tries to put physical distance between himself and his grief, vacating the bedroom for the sofa, his house for the shed and finally Clydebank for London, where he lives on the street with hunger and violence never far off and only cans of lager and an erratic fellow vagrant named Beans to sustain him. It is an epic fall.
In short, the novel is so harrowing and depressing that the cover ought to carry a surgeon general’s warning. Mick retains flashes of humor, but for the most part the sameness of his dejection flattens out into a monotone, a sad contrast to the virtuosic patter of Raisin’s excellent debut, “Out Backward.”
Mick seems to miss his job, despite what it wrought, almost as much as he misses his wife. Recollections of Clydebank’s glory days provide some of the only uplift: “The sheer thrill of a ship on its stocks, grown from just a few small pieces of metal, walking toward it each morning and seeing that it was bigger, looking like it was parked there at the end of the street, looming over the end tenement.”
From the turn of the century until the mass layoffs of the ’70s, “Clydebuilt” was synonymous with top-notch, first-class ironclads. Liners including the Lusitania (1906), the Queen Elizabeth (1938) and the Queen Elizabeth 2 (1967) were made at Clydebank, with Mick lapping up free whiskey at the launching of the last. It was said that if only the Titanic had been Clydebuilt, the ship would have made a mess of the iceberg, not the other way around. Mick gloried in the workmen’s graffiti on the sides of the ship, the rats scuttling down the mooring ropes, the heavy and hard work. The solidity of his former life as a husband and shipbuilder makes his decline all the more shocking.
In Orwell’s formulation, “If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.” This is from an essay on Dickens, so Orwell qualifies it: criminals and the working-class intelligentsia get a showing, but not the “ordinary town proletariat, the people who make the wheels go round.” In Mick we have an affecting portrait of this type of person, after the wheels have stopped turning. Still, it takes no small readerly fortitude to get through a book as relentlessly downbeat as “Waterline,” even if its story — a man with no savings or safety net falls hard through the cracks — plays out every day in every city in the world.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/bo...html?ref=books