One of the more interesting trends in historical fiction over the past decade has been the emergence of novels about human enterprise. Last year, John Griesemer spun a long and unwieldy tale about the laying of transatlantic cable in Signal and Noise. That same year, Rose Tremain published The Colour, a shimmering novel about New Zealand's 19th-century gold rush. Although there are nominal heroes in these books, the true protagonist is human effort itself; rising up from sweat and toil and dreaming to make a better, richer world for us all.
This is certainly the subtext to Bruce Murkoff's lavishly detailed debut novel, Waterborne, an epic tale set in the Depression, concerning the building of the Boulder Dam. You have to give Murkoff a running start here, since it's difficult to think of a subject with less sex appeal than dam construction in the 1930s. After all, this was back in the day before those giant earth-movers that look like oversized sandbox toys. Construction of anything so large was dangerous, backbreaking, tedious work and Murkoff has bravely staked a claim that he can make us care.
And he does, to an extent. The novel opens with a three-page riff on the Colorado River and how it squeezes through rocks and ravines to carve a swath through the American West. The characters Murkoff introduces are of a similarly stubborn ilk. There's Lew Beck, a tough guy whose emotional reserves have run dry; Filus Poe, an engineer seeking to bury the grief over his wife and son's untimely deaths; and Lena McCardell, a hardscrabble woman who's recently escaped being the second wife to a bigamist Bible salesman.
Their lives converge in Boulder City, "the only city in America where everyone has a job," like rivers running to a basin. Just as they come to town when men are trying to tame a river, Murkoff's cast have come to a place hoping to tame something wild and yearning in themselves. Of the three, Filus is by the far most compelling. He lurches and skulks through the pages with a vibrating menace, sussing out people's weak spots and tucking away that knowledge for later use.
For all the deceit and danger lurking here, Waterborne remains a period novel written with period pacing. The romance which develops between Lena and Filus moves at a glacial pace and then blossoms into high melodrama. Meanwhile, Murkoff gives the story a continuous backdrop of natural description, which kicks in like the string quartet of a big-budget Hollywood movie soundtrack. The novel's best passages actually occur in the past tense, as Murkoff flashes back to fill us in about how these three desperate characters wound up in such a god-awful town in a god-awful time.
As much as these back stories prevent readers from entirely giving up on Waterborne, the novel's folksy uplift becomes as distracting and annoying as it is in Steinbeck's fiction (which Waterborne occasionally mimics). Like that great Californian writer, Murkoff is a talented, if verbose, stylist who reserves his best writing for nature rather than people. If your heart melts when a novelist waxes poetic about stars that "shone like rivets in the coal black sky," then this is a novel worth checking out. If, however, you come to fiction not for landscape but real people—characters who are more than just part of a larger moment but singular, unforgettable creations in their own right—then you should probably let Waterborne float on by.