December 17, 2024
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Book Review: In a drowning New York City, can all natural history be saved?
In the bleak genre of climate fiction, a new novel ranks high for its empathy
All the water in the world: a novel
By Eiren Caffall. San Martin
Press, 2025 ($29)
The lyrics to Eiren Caffall’s first novel, but as its title suggests, focus on life after a great flood, with a young woman known as Nonie drowning in canoes in New York City and up the Hudson River to the Berkshire highlands. Befitting the genre of post-apocalyptic American fiction, Caffall offers grand visions of the world made strange—Nonie sits in the bow of the canoe, looking for “outsides” where she can see the water, such as the tops of lampposts or the trees of Central Park, and it moves her. suspense in the encounters with various settlements and fauna along the route.
Like Emily St. John Mandel’s cultural ephemera Station elevenSeeds from Alison Stine’s Road Out of Winter or Child in the Womb by Louise Erdrich The Future Home of the Living Godthe symbol of hope has been carried from the fallen civilization of the book to take root in the next. This time that symbol is natural history itself, as the former scientists of the American Museum of Natural History in New York have recorded in a magazine. At the beginning of the novel, in a city still completely flooded, these scientists and their families have formed a temporary society on the roof of the museum. To protect the physical exhibits that may not survive, they have tried to preserve the knowledge these exhibits represent in a journal that will be carried in Nonie’s pack when the waters rise.
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Like his fellow scientists and survivors, Caffall enjoys the museum and its treasures. The vision of the organization laid bare by desperate carers is uncomfortable and moving. The novel is often dark, steeped in grief and uncertainty, preoccupied with practicalities like infections and finding antibiotics. Caffall opts for a vividly reflective approach with short, thoughtful chapters on life after the end. (Violence, including threats of sexual assault, mostly occurs off the page.) But that’s not to suggest that. All the Water in the World It overlooks the beauty and wonder of Nonie’s adventure. His family is moving away from the museum in an indigenous canoe from an old exhibit is tense, pleasant and richly resonant.
