Steven Sherrill’s second novel Visits from a Drowned Girl is a off-beat and – at times – vulgar tale of a simple disconnected man, who becomes increasingly emotionally isolated by a chance encounter with a stranger’s bizarre suicide. Sadly this most intriguing of novels never really reaches the heights that it initially promises. Still, Visits from a Drowned Girl is an original and engaging attempt to dissect our post-modern dislocated lives. The novel begins when Benny Poteat: our withdrawn and voyeuristic protagonist, observes a young woman stop by a flood-swollen river, set up her video camera, the leaving the tape running she undresses in front of it and calmly walk into the water. Only the video record of her strange suicide, a bag of video tapes and a business card of a manager of a local apartment complex remains as testament to her final act. Benny, torn between handing the tapes in and keeping this secret to himself, takes the tapes and slowly starts to untangle the girl’s life from the recordings, finding his own closely-woven life also starts to unravel.
As you would expect, Benny’s investigations drags him into the girl’s life and the underlying seediness of his Southern small town, but unlike David Lynch’s noir-esque Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, which Visits from a Drowned Girl is slightly reminiscent of – where a horrific incident leads to the character’s learning of the sinister truth lurking behind the façade of their cosy communities -Steven Sherrill instead uses the suicide event and the power that this secret gives as a means of unlocking the dark side of Benny’s own character, rather than just the world around him. Indeed even the improbably long time period over which Benny plays the tapes, seems to be an act of control via denial of himself, although this could have just been a plot devise to keep us from finding out the drowned girls secret in the first three chapters.
As we see the inward corruption of the drowned girl tapes start to erode Benny’s moral compass and destroy his bustling yet disconnected life, Benny developments from an affable, if slightly stoic guy with an innate fear of relationships, into an cowedly, pathological control freak, who becomes increasingly unable to make decisions or take instinctively act, but compelled to passively observe. By the end of the novel Benny’s voyeurism, decisive paralysis and moral breakdown destroys his once simple life and drastically reduces our own identification with him, as he becomes increasingly unforgivable. Still, there is much to like in this novel: almost every character, nook and cranny of Benny’s atomised yet over-crowded community has a beautifully constructed back story to discover and while Sherrill’s writing sometimes gets a little cluttered for its own good, he has a rare gift of quirky prose and realistic dialogue, making Visits from a Drowned Girl a real pleasure to read – although there are many scenes that will make difficult reading for the more prudish reader, especially the disturbing goat scene!
Unfortunately there is little all that significant about the drowned girl herself: her life is as artificial and soulless as the society she lives in, and while we certainly get to see some of the less savoury aspects of Benny’s community, the reader will never get that investigative noir-esque sense of discovery that the novel’s splendid premise seems to suggest. While using the drowned girl’s death as a simple plot dynamic might have seemed a little cheap and – even – cheesy, there is still plenty of intelligent literary quality here that would have stopped it from becoming another genre pot-boiler.
While Visits from a Drowned Girl lacks that vital element of having a solid story, which – sadly – stops it from becoming the Great American Novel it so much wants to be, it is still a fine, intelligent and original novel, and judging by the strength of this novel, I would not be surprised if Steven Sherrill might just produce the next Great American Novel sometime soon.
