![]() ![]() The most urgent sections of this ambitious novel are, for this reader, its more grounded ones. One of achievements in this novel is to closely underscore the human particularity of a range of enslaved men and women. Here the effect is more diffuse, and something intangible goes missing. In his earlier books each paragraph felt like a bouillon cube that could be used to brew six other essays. ![]() The ride is bracing, even if one sometimes misses the grainy and intense intellection of his nonfiction writing. Coates writes as if he’s thrown his readers into a carriage and is hurtling them through the woods. ![]() The Water Dancer is a jeroboam of a book, a crowd-pleasing exercise in breakneck and often occult storytelling that tonally resembles the work of Stephen King as much as it does the work of Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead and the touchstone African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler. This isn’t a typical first novel, if by 'typical first novel' we mean a minor-chord and semi-autobiographical nibbling expedition around the margins of a life. The most surprising thing about The Water Dancer may be its unambiguous narrative ambition. ![]()
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