Water Dreams Hardcover - 2003

From the publisher

Fiction

Fishing alone on a Tennessee lake, Miller Sharp sees a young man dive into the water and not come up. Two tense minutes pass. Then Miller dives in to rescue him.

Underwater, he finds himself in a life-and-death struggle to keep from drowning as Jimmy Duane Goodfriend, the diver and victim, begins to climb Miller's body in a desperate attempt to gain the surface. He pulls Miller further down. To free himself, Miller bites the drowning man's hand and rises to the air.

But Jimmy Duane is lifeless. After dragging him to the dock, Miller must tell the victim's family that Jimmy Duane is dead.

In Water Dreams, a first novel by Jeanne McDonald, this death by drowning is a thematic chord that resounds in the suffocating aftermath. Miller is haunted by the realities of the peril of lifesaving. In his growing obsession to protect the dead man's widow, he becomes her lover, and his comfortably white, upper-middle-class existence founders as he is immersed in Jimmy Duane's "redneck" culture and low-class lifestyle.

Miller's fall and potential redemption form the crux of Water Dreams. But it is McDonald's unstinting hard edge, her precise characterizations, and her potent atmospheric detail that set the novel apart.

Jeanne McDonald is the co-author of The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith and Growing Up Southern: How the South Shapes Its Writers. Her work has appeared in River City Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, and the Knoxville News-Sentinel. She lives in Knoxville, Tennessee.