Book Review: The Meeting of Air and Water
The Meeting of Air and Water. Sharon LaCour, Claudia Drive Books, September 2024, paperback and ebook, 256 pages.
Reviewed by Marssie Mencotti
Daily life in Cocodrie, as author Sharon LaCour establishes, is cyclical, smooth and rhythmic. Generations of Acadian people are born, live and pass on in the bayou of Louisiana and have their own ways, and there was and still is beauty and joy in this strong community. People believed in the roles they were assigned and lived them with faith, generational stories, a bit of sorcery and celebration. There was also both loving and grudging acceptance for people that were different. It may not have been idyllic, but it was somehow right, if you stayed between the cultural rails that were provided for your safety.
The Meeting of Air and Water is more than a novel of Cajun family life and hidden history. It’s paced as a long walk through many decades in a dreamy atmosphere and written with a fresh approach to the serendipity and predictability of actual lives unfolding.
Every now and then, a person in a community proceeds in a unique way and sees something fully expressed in a fountain, a sky and a kiss. And sometimes this causes a more complicated explanation.
In LaCour's delicately written novel, there is difficult but enduring love between three generations. It’s the stressful straining and stretching of uncovering and unleashing family history. The author explores a too common trait among families of submerging their hidden history because of perceived shame, eccentric behavior, buried anger and mental illness that seemed patched over and forgotten.
Elaine, our young protagonist, returns home trying to connect with her own restless needs and feelings. Charlotte, her mother, is reticent to discuss Dolores, Elaine’s grandmother, and Elaine’s grandfather is even less inclined to discuss his deceased wife. Elaine’s yearning for information about Dolores unleashes even more stonewalling on her mother and grandfather’s side. This novel is a gentle polemic about how what we tell one another about the past and what we withhold ultimately shape all our relationships.
Socrates is reputed to have said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Ultimately leading to his trial choice for death rather than exile. This novel reinforces our drive to examine our lives in terms of our living families and antecedents, through their struggles, achievements and secrets. Elaine has reached an impasse in trying to discover her artistic self, and the family seems to be holding fast to the secrets that may set her free.
We learn from LaCour that for this family, time can cover only so much past behavior and invented gossip before it bobs to the present and demands to be reconsidered. The secrets that reveal themselves are sometimes vague assessments of the past — suppressed to protect and not to destroy. The delicate unfolding throughout this exquisite short novel is written with great affection and care. Mental illness and the fear that it might be inherited is a greater secret than extolling Delores’ exceptional talent. Dolores’ photographic skill is not celebrated by her family or community as art but merely treated as eccentricity. This infantilization of her true art is a battle she lives with along with the silent condescension and false acceptance she is accorded. This a complicated story honestly expressed about the human foibles surrounding love, art, acceptance, fear, anger, repression, avoidance, white moods and white lies.
“The whole city was like that, one hidden story after another, and suddenly Elaine felt herself seeing in stories.” The Meeting of Air and Water, p.67
I found this book is not as much Elaine’s story but Delores’. LaCour lovingly takes us to the past with chapters artfully constructed that elucidate the complex reflections of Delores, an orphaned child-woman in Cocodrie. During steamy lazy afternoons, she grows up a complacent and solitary child, walking the byways of her beloved town taking photographs with a camera given to her by a traveling photographer. It becomes her private mission to capture moments as stories in time. LaCour walks us softly through Delores’ adolescence and marriage to her childhood friend, Earl. The power of reconstructing the past as LaCour has so wonderfully done here is to make the story of a highly artistic shy young woman’s plight in the 1920s and 1930s so much more meaningful than the ennui of a successful woman dropping out in current time. Delores was extraordinary and relentless in her passion, a compelling character we want to succeed.
Delores’ most famous unsigned photograph, The Meeting of Air and Water, is also a perfect metaphor for Dolores and her ability to be living in the dense water of life and above it in an airy plane of imagination. She may have a mental illness, perhaps bipolar disorder or depression, that shapes her white moods, as it had shaped her mother’s lethargy and unhappiness. It is undiagnosed. These moods create resentment among her family, especially from her daughter Charlotte.
Interspersed with Dolores’ beautiful yet troubled story, LaCour reveals another person who has buried secrets of the past. Now the suspense swells with two people who can help Elaine but neither willing to do so. Earl, Elaine’s grandfather who partially raised her, has mixed recollections of his deceased wife but is reticent to discuss them. When a storm comes, Earl pretends it’s not a hurricane but simply a thunderstorm. His skill at underestimating and burying reality also does irreparable damage to the spoken memory of his departed wife. When he asks Elaine to help find a lady friend for him, she connects the dots that bring Audrey to Earl, and ultimately to a genuine conversation about the past.
Everything in this book is wrapped in love and culture, from the steamy and turbulent air to the ever-present water of the ocean, lakes, rivers, estuaries and bayou. LaCour shows us that we all hover between air and water. It is what all people are made of, but some in rather exceptional combinations. People are also capable of spreading the dirt that lies between the two and muddying the actual story of people who are different.
What families do and say, the decisions they made and continue to make, the secrets and omissions, the feelings and forgiveness, the living of each day doing what we must while lives are lost and love found, are all in this small book. What an incandescent photograph it takes of lives devoted to beauty and friendship, family and understanding, yet in the shadows lurk sadness, mental illness and misunderstanding. Best of all, The Meeting of Air and Water celebrates what can be eventually mended by truth when the past is painfully but thoroughly embraced. She brings us a peaceful picture of art and life, air and water, finely balanced by truth and ready to move forward in time with hope.
