Jeffrey Perso. Water Bodies. Black Rose Writing, 2019.

“Violence is different in small towns…” (42)

Water Bodies is weird and wacky. Some readers, especially those from the Mississippi River Valley, may find it hilarious. Others may scratch their heads.

Water Bodies is a novel. That is, it is a fictional prose narrative. However, the plot is secondary to the setting and character sketches that make up the bulk of the story. We are introduced to a small city on the banks of the Mississippi in Wisconsin, across the river from Minnesota. It is not too far from Lake Onalaska.

The narrator, one Professor John Voltaire, has returned to his hometown of L after many years of being away—and, we the get the sense, not really relishing the return. Like some nineteenth century novels, the dates and town name are not filled in; for example the story takes place in May___. However, we are aware that the letter L, especially when pronounced in certain dialects, sounds like hell. That could be where we are.

Instead of the five classical rivers traversing the Underworld, there is one, the mighty Mississippi. But since Dr. Voltaire has returned, there have been many unfortunate accidents, most somehow involving the river. Readers soon lose track of the body count. The deaths include picnickers, drunks, partiers, students from the nearby college, boaters, swimmers, suicides. The means include assaults, accidents, miscalculations, murders, and simple stupidity.

In the course of the novel we are given sketches of many of the people and institutions: the bars, the churches, the gangs, the politicians, the law officers, the lawyers, the fishermen, the civil engineers, among others. L sounds like a decaying city, perhaps like Empire Falls expressed with a lot more hyperbole. The population seems largely made up of hypocrites.

The deaths appear to be caused by an unspecified miasma or pestilence or river monster or random fate. Since some recent graffiti in town has smiley faces and similar images, law enforcement begins to think there is a mass murderer out there who is leaving these images. People start referring to the Emoticon Killer.

Among chapters of such descriptions and wild speculations, we learn that Prof. Voltaire has returned to help settle the family legacy. His mother is dead and his father has been confined for many years to a mental institution. His brother and sister still live in the family homestead. The sister Lara wants to sell the house; the brother Cristo does not. John returns because all three have to agree on whatever the disposal of the estate will be.

Lara has been married four times and is single again. Cristo has never married and considers himself an artist and writer. He mostly wanders the town with a shopping cart collecting cast off items in alleys to use for his art or to describe in his writing. The opus he is working on will supposedly solve the problem of fate versus free will.

All three siblings were affected by the death of their parents. The mother was hanged and the father shot point-blank in an apparent murder-suicide attempt, except that no one could determine who initiated the crime. The father survived the wound to the head, but it affected his mental capacity, hence his institutionalization.

So it goes on. Cristo takes John on a tour of the town’s seedy places as a Virgil to John’s Dante in this modern Inferno. No one is pleasant or comes across positively. It is a satire not unlike Dante’s, except (one hopes) that all the characters are fictional.

While the tale tends towards the gonzo style, there are literary allusions. The story begins with an epigram from The Waste Land quoting Wagner. One of the family names in L is Sosotris, like the fortuneteller in the Eliot poem. London was the center of Eliot’s wasteland. L is Perso’s. One of the characters happens to quote from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

The ending suggests—perhaps—there is another river, more inviting than the deadly, ravenous Mississippi. Perhaps there is a Paradiso somewhere? I was reminded a bit of the ending of Fahrenheit 451 as well as the ending of the Book of Revelation. After all the disasters, plagues, and curses of John’s Apocalypse, including such things as the sea turning blood-red and waters infected by wormwood, it ends with a far different image:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed… (Revelation 22:1-3)

Water Bodies (which reminds us, by the way, that the human body is about 60% water) might not be for everyone. It does contain some ribald and scatological humor, but it is a wild entertainment with an intellectual current propelling it along.