This Is the Water (Murphy)

This Is the Water 
Yannick Murphy, 2014
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062294906


Summary
A fast-paced story of murder, adultery, parenthood, and romance, involving a girls’ swim team, their morally flawed parents, and a killer who swims in their midst.

In a quiet New England community members of swim team and their dedicated parents are preparing for a home meet. The most that Annie, a swim-mom of two girls, has to worry about is whether or not she fed her daughters enough carbs the night before; why her husband, Thomas, hasn’t kissed her in ages; and why she can’t get over the loss of her brother who shot himself a few years ago.

But Annie’s world is about to change. From the bleachers, looking down at the swimmers, a dark haired man watches a girl. No one notices him. Annie is busy getting to know Paul, who flirts with Annie despite the fact that he’s married to her friend Chris, and despite Annie’s greying hair and crow’s feet. Chris is busy trying to discover whether or not Paul is really having an affair, and the swimmers are trying to shave milliseconds off their race times by squeezing themselves into skin-tight bathing suits and visualizing themselves winning their races.

When a girl on the team is murdered at a nearby highway rest stop—the same rest stop where Paul made a gruesome discovery years ago—the parents suddenly find themselves adrift. Paul turns to Annie for comfort. Annie finds herself falling in love. Chris becomes obsessed with unmasking the killer.

With a serial killer now too close for comfort, Annie and her fellow swim-parents must make choices about where their loyalties lie. As a series of startling events unfold, Annie discovers what it means to follow your intuition, even if love, as well as lives, could be lost. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1958 (?)
• Raised—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Hamshire College; M.A., New York University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Reading, Vermont


Yannick Murphy is an American novelist and short story writer. She graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts and received a graduate degree from New York University where she studied with Gordon Lish (writer and famed editor of Raymond Carver).

She has taught creative writing at the University of Southern California, University of California-Los Angeles, New York University, and Oberlin College in Ohio. She has also worked a variety of other jobs, ranging from personal assistant to famed journalist Carl Bernstein (All the President's Men) to the Hair Club for Men.

Yannick is the author of This Is the Water (2014), The Call (2011), Signed, Mata Hari (2007), Here They Come (2006), and The Sea of Trees (1997), as well as two story collections and several children's books.

She lives in Vermont, with her veterinery husband and their three children.

Awards
1990 Whiting Writers' Award
National Endowment for the Arts award
Chesterfield Screenwriting award
MacDowell Colony fellowship
The 2012 Winship/PEN New England Award. (Awards list from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
(Starred review.) [O]bscenely suspenseful.... Murphy...known for her stylistic experimentation, tries out a second-person perspective and a continual “this is” structure...that works... [I]n Murphy’s hands, the structure becomes almost hypnotic—and when the story hits full speed in the final quarter, the suspense becomes almost excruciating. (Aug.)
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [A] propulsive, psychologically lush, witty, and unpredictable novel.... Murphy’s evocation of feverish competition, stressed marriages, and the shocking banality of a serial killer’s inner life coalesce in a novel of acute observation, penetrating imagination, and rare agility that is capped by a resounding denouement.
Booklist


An offbeat thriller.... Countless sentences begin “This is,” as Murphy assumes the voice of a preschool teacher.... Murphy also presents the thoughts of swim-mom Annie in what for this woman is the aptly self-conscious “you” of the second person.... [A] different sort of murder yarn that boasts twists in both the style and the plot.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher. In the meantime, use our generic mystery questions.)

GENERIC QUESTIONS
Mystery / Crime / Suspense Thrillers

1. Talk about the characters, both good and bad. Describe their personalities and motivations. Are they fully developed and emotionally complex? Or are they more one-dimensional heroes and villains?

2. What do you know...and when do you know it? At what point in the book do you, the reader, begin to piece together what happened?

3. Good crime writers are skillful at hiding clues in plain sight. How well does the author hide the clues in this work?

4. Does the author use red-herrings—false clues—to purposely lead readers astray?

5. Talk about plot's twists & turns—those surprising developments that throw everything you think you've figured out into disarray. Do they enhance the story, add complexity, and build suspense? Are they  plausible? Or do the twists & turns feel forced and preposterous—inserted only to extend the story.

6. Does the author ratchet up the story's suspense? Did you find yourself anxious—quickly turning pages to learn what happened? How does the author build suspense?

7. What about the ending—is it satisfying? Is it probable or believable? Does it grow out of clues previously laid out by the author (see Question 2). Or does the ending come out of the blue? Does it feel forced...tacked-on...or a cop-out? Or perhaps it's too predictable. Can you envision a better, or different, ending?

8. Are there certain passages in the book—ideas, descriptions, or dialogue—that you found interesting or revealing...or that somehow struck you? What lines, if any, made you stop and think?

9. Overall, does the book satisfy? Does it live up to the standards of a good crime story or suspense thriller? Why or why not?

(Generic Mystery Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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