A bigger picture

Through stories that jump between characters, points of view and decades, Carl Nixon builds a dark family drama from the outside in.

- REBECCA HILL

THE WATERS, by Carl Nixon (Vintage, $37)

Carl Nixon's fifth novel is described as "a novel in 21 stories", and some of these story-chapters will be familiar to readers from the story competitions Nixon has won, or from anthologies or magazines in which they first appeared. The Waters is less a typical novel about the Waters, a troubled family from near Christchurch, and more a collection of Waters-adjacent short stories that jump between characters, points of view and decades to build this dark family drama from the outside in.

The Waters themselves are as much a fixture of their small Canterbury town as "the pub, the two-classroom school or the old jetty". Mark, the oldest brother of the family and the novel's first point of view, is a loner, with a mysterious scar over one eye and an affinity for violence directed mostly at his father, Pat.

The next one down is Davey, the best looking of the family, who develops a drug problem, and caring Samantha, the baby of the family, who grows up with foster parents. Marika, their mother, makes her first appearance in a Hanmer hot pool, confiding in a stranger: