Flat Water Tuesday

I just finished my advanced readers copy of Ron Irwin's Flat Water Tuesday that I had won in a photography contest months ago. Grad school being what it is, I haven’t read a book for pleasure in two months, so I made up for lost time by reading Flat Water Tuesday in one day. I’ve never read an advanced copy before and didn’t quite know what to expect. Aside from some several continuity and misnaming mistakes, it was much like any other book. As a reader those mistakes annoyed me, because for a moment they took me out of the story. I had to go back, reread and make sure I was still following who was speaking to who, or if I was still involved with the character who’d been mentioned earlier. As a writer though, these mistakes did the opposite. They fascinated me. Why did Irwin decide (apparently half way through the story) that this character was from New York instead of Boston? Why did he choose the names he did for his characters? How important was it that one particular character said one particular thing to another? Changes, when left unnoticed serve as a tiny insight into the authors process, something we don’t often see in a finished work. But enough about the issues of my particular copy; you are interested in the story itself.

            Growing up in New England and attending a small NESCAC college, I have a soft spot in my heart for the preppy private school stories. I’ve read quite a few and they never fail to intrigue me. Flat Water Tuesday fulfills the majority of the stereotypes that run rampant in this prep school genre. Rob Carrey is a scholarship kid who arrives at the Fenton School and immediately feels at odds with the rich students. The emphasis on class differences dissipates as the story continues, but the idea that poor kids and rich kids can never fully understand each other is definitely there. Of course, then there is the misunderstood rich kid stereotype that the character of Connor Payne fills perfectly. Just because they have it all in terms of good looks, athleticism and money doesn’t mean they don’t crave the affection of distant parents. Connor is the charming, arrogant male that the protagonist must work against until ultimately the two come to respect each other. Check. There is the dark and mysterious female who intrigues but is off limits in someway, just waiting to be the source of unrequited love. Check. Throw in the older coach/teacher figure and a glorification of rule breaking and Flat Water Tuesday easily joins the family of stories like The Starboard Sea, A Separate Peace and Dead Poets Society. Where Irwin triumphs is when he breaks out of this stereotypical mold, not only by bypassing the usual homosexual longings that accompany stories of boys at boarding schools, but also instead giving the reader solid, accurate depth in the rowing scenes of the novel, and using a complex framing story to keep character perspective changing.

            So about that rowing. Basic plot of the book is Rob Carrey is a sculler from upstate New York, comes to Fenton to do a post grad year and row. The team has a race against a rival school that means everything and the training and competition for this race makes up the bulk of the story. I probably enjoyed this book more than most because I am a rower and a coach of the sport as well. Irwin writes with accuracy about the finer details of rowing, although is emphasis lies more with the pain of training than the near spiritual experience of rowing down the river perfectly in time with the other athletes in the boat. I am ok with this uneven representation only because I know the endless hours of work that go into creating one perfect stoke. Perhaps other readers will now understand that although rowing looks beautiful and effortless, a lot of sweat, blood and tears go into making it look that way. A race is a fight to the death inside the boat and inside a rower’s head.

            Irwin has a talent for putting us in the rower’s head and in the moment of the story. Again, I might have appreciated this more being a rower. At one point Irwin is describing the minutes just before an erg test and my stomach was in knots, thinking back to all those times when I’d stood in front of an erg and prepared to do battle. As I read that same horrible nervous feeling settled upon me and when Irwin mentioned the test piece was 2500 meters instead of today’s standard 2000 I literally had to close the book and shudder. The thought of an extra 500 meters of absolute effort made me want to cry, but props to Irwin for managing to put me deep into his story to feel that way.

            In other areas Irwin’s technique becomes suspect. He starts with the most subtle foreshadowing but it grows to the point where about half way through the book I knew what was going to happen. Granted I had started the book with a few suspicions and had pretty much called the plot a few chapters in, but thanks to Irwin’s detail about rowing and the general pacing of the story, I didn’t mind. By the end of the novel though the foreshadowing has become so obvious one of the characters calls attention to it. “I can’t believe he did this. It’s the exact same thing that this guy did,” (to paraphrase). Now this moment can either be read as wonderfully meta-literary, with Irwin showing a sense of humor about his own work, or it is worthy of a double face palm for the way it patronizes the reader, forcing them to acknowledge foreshadowing that they obviously already picked up on. I’d like to believe the former, since the rest of Irwin’s writing, particularly the framing story, is quite good.

            Ah the framing story. Besides the rowing bits, this was by far my favorite element of Flat Water Tuesday. Here Irwin gives the reader the perspective of Rob Carrey fifteen years after he graduates from Fenton.  It is a story of a modern relationship and the terrible tragedies of life that is told in a genuine voice that I loved reading. Rob has been living with his girlfriend Carolyn for five years and their relationship is failing. Slowly, over the course of the novel we find out why and this was the only part of the book that emotionally moved me. Carolyn is a wonderfully complex character and the situation she and Rob find themselves in will tug at any heartstrings. Their story could probably stand alone as a novel in its own right. That being said, it ties in relatively seamlessly with Rob’s recollections of his year at Fenton and the two plot lines come crashing together at the end of the novel in an ending that while not necessarily satisfying still worked for me on the whole. If you are a rower this is a must read. If you aren’t but just enjoy human emotion, I’d say go for it as well.