Trigger warning for references to suicide.
The Kurkjians lot in life seems to be misery. The Kurkjians who survived the Armenian Genocide were haunted by their many losses. Their grandchildren struggle with alcohol abuse, infidelity, and loneliness. Their great-grandchildren also deal with substance abuse. Shortly before Aram Mrjoian’s diffuse novel, Waterline, opens, the family receive news that a beloved daughter and cousin has completed suicide. The news shatters the family, sending its members into a tailspin of grief, anger, and confusion.
Only a few of the chapters in Waterline are narrated by characters we’ve met before. There are also chapters set decades before Mari’s death. While the variety of settings and narrators helps fill in a portrait of the Kurkjians, this style of narration and the actions of the various characters felt more like linked stories than a novel with an overall plot arc. Hence, diffuse. Very few of the Kurkjians seek comfort from each other. Instead, the ones most lost to grief—Mari’s father, Karo, and her cousin, Ani—disappear. Karo crawls into a bottle of brandy while Ani takes some of Mari’s ashes on the road trip the pair had always planned. Ani’s parents, Edgar and Hannah, push themselves to try to “move on” and “return to normal.” Ani’s young siblings, Joe and Tal, turn to hedonism in the form of beer, weed, and (for Tal) sex.
To me, the most interesting characters (and, unfortunately for me, the ones who appear the least in these pages) are Gregor and Mara Kurkjian, who fled to the United States after escaping from the Ottoman Empire. Gregor would tell stories of Armenia, the resistance’s stand at Musa Dagh, and his family’s journey to America. His grandson, Karo, and great-grandchildren Mari and Joe, read Franz Werfel’s account of what happened, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, as part of their efforts to learn more about what Gregor and Mara went through and what was lost during the Genocide. Readers looking for historical fiction about Armenians and the Armenian Genocide should look elsewhere; almost all of this book is set in Detroit in the 2000s.
Because the characters who take turns narrating Waterline are all, essentially, following their own paths, there isn’t much in the way of resolution to this novel. I strongly suggest approaching this book as linked stories, in which the various members of the Kurkjian try (and sometimes fail) to support each other, as well as remember their lost ones. As with any family, some characters will infuriate while others make you want to give them a hug through the pages. At least a few of the Kurkjians would benefit from talking to a therapist.
I was frustrated by this book, but I suspect it will provide a lot of material for book clubs to discuss.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.