After We Drowned
After We Drowned
by Jill Yonit Goldberg
Anvil Press, 2024; 264 pages; $22
Reviewed by Peter Babiak
I don’t think there’s a word for that feeling of really wanting to get back to the novel you’ve been reading. Not just a desire to slip back into its imaginative world, a need to live alongside its plot and characterizations, but a word for being seduced by its language, by the writer’s ability to craft new thoughts and feelings with their phrases and sentences. Whatever that word might be, it names my experience reading Jill Goldberg’s After We Drowned, which is, by all metrics I’m aware of, one fucking magnificent novel.
Narrated mostly by Jesse, a fifteen-year-old stumbling through the outskirts of manhood in the 1980s, the novel unfolds the gripping story of a part-Cajun Louisiana family — Angeline and Emmett, his mother and father, and Willow Rose, his younger sister — living and adjusting to their poverty, and to the psychological aftermath of a deadly explosion Emmett survives while working on an oil rig in the Gulf. The father narrates only a handful of chapters, offering beautifully written despairing counterpoints to the more familiar scenes — social, familial, sexual — of Jesse’s coming-of-age story. “I should have died that night,” Emmett confesses in his first narrative. “The greater punishment is to live.” Like any survivor of trauma, Jesse’s dad is walking proof of Freud’s claim that unexpressed emotions never go away but always come out in ugly ways. As his do — in his drinking, in the odious standard of masculinity he expects from Jesse (“‘Pussy.’ That’s what my father calls me now,” the boy says early on), in the numbing dread and that thrum of real and potential violence Goldberg weaves into his characterization, starting with Jesse's first sentence, “Daddy’s been obsessed with killing things,” which is one of the most badass poetic opening lines I’ve ever read.
The four main characters are well-rounded and engaging because they’re so perfectly imperfect, but Jesse is the driving fulcrum and force of the plot. Like a poorer but more reliable Holden Caulfield or a more sensitive Ponyboy Curtis, he navigates the stormy waters of his own teenage life, his family’s persistent burdens (apart from the poverty and the father’s troubles, the suturing event involves the beastly circumstances of his mother’s pregnancy, the birth of a baby brother and his agonizing fate), and his world’s working-class exigencies as a reflective observer who remains above the fray even as he knows it has been entirely formed by his frayed social contexts. "I guess some people have life by the balls, but the rest of us — life has got you,” his internal monologue reads at one of the later climactic moments, with that abrupt pause and subtle shift from abstract noun to second-person pronoun laying bare and personalizing his resolutely unromantic view of life. The literary world always needs more focus on the working-class, which some might unfairly call poor white trash; they’re more intriguing.
Goldberg’s narrative is nowhere laden with paragraphs of self-indulgent inwardness. Yes, Emmett’s few chapters are cut from the cloth of the psychological novel because his grief-stricken and guilty thoughts are just as important as the external action. At one point, for instance, he spends days in a Walmart parking lot, smoking, drinking, eating chips, and hating himself, but this is understandable given that from beginning to end he’s coming to terms with the horrible demise of another rig worker whose death was his fault. The compulsion to subjective narration doesn’t outweigh the events in Jesse’s narration, either, owing to the transitory nature of his juvenile mind, which seem well suited to the novel’s episodic format.
“Adventure,” as Milan Kundera says, is the “great theme” of all novels, and After We Drowned is never without the kind of riveting characters and events that drive the plot and grip readers. Goldberg lays out the narrative in forty-four chapters, each with a title pulled from a 1980s song (“Money for Nothing”, “Rock me Like a Hurricane”, and so on) that connects in one way or another to the narrative and each is a self-contained story with its own arc, all of them leading to the novel’s tumultuous ending. This novel could be a Netflix mini-series, what with the allure of the bayou setting and the always entertaining Southern Gothic aesthetic of poverty and family secrets.
But ultimately what makes this an excellent novel is the writer’s attentiveness to word craft. Goldberg takes metaphors, similes, analogies and all the other nuts and bolts of literary writing very seriously. Emmett escapes the burning rig by jumping into the Gulf, “as if drilling into concrete with my body.” Angeline “knows, the way you can smell evil, that something isn’t right.” Willow Rose’s sleeping legs are “flung out like wild vines of morning glory.” The most evocative of these belong to Jesse. The rifle he holds is “Heavy like fear and anger.” Sex with Lisette is marked by the honest beauty of teenage carnality: “I tremble into her.” He describes a Texas sunrise as “blazes of pink and gold” but then accents the ordinary description with this jaw-dropping poetry: “this is how all the forevers in the world look.” Later, when confronting his father in the heat of a decrepit trailer, the “ancient metallic fan creaks but does nothing to keep the heat from taking up all the space.” Near the end of the story, as the remnants of the family escape the Gulf coast as a hurricane approaches, Jesse explains: “A hurricane isn’t a storm, it’s a fury. It is a scream ripped from the sky,” and “It will end you with wind or rain or flood.” More than credible characters or captivating action, it’s elementary figurative particles like these that are the objective evidence of excellent literature. Which After We Drowned certainly is. »