almost every time you expect a scene of horror, you get a scene of kinship instead.
But if this is an era - and a genre - that has no room for encouragement, The Sweetness of Water is finally willing to carve out a little oasis of hope. As an author, Harris eventually exercises a kind of fiery Old Testament justice, which is at once satisfying and terrifying. What’s most impressive about Harris’s novel is how he attends to the lives of these peculiar people while capturing the tectonic tensions at play in the American South. Harris stacks the timbers of this plot deliberately, and the moment a spark alights, the whole structure begins to burn hot. All of this is drawn with gorgeous fidelity to these cautious characters, struggling to remake the world, or at least this little patch of it. And he explores this liminal moment in our history with extraordinary sensitivity to the range of responses from Black and White Americans contending with a revolutionary ideal of personhood. His prose is burnished with an antique patina that evokes the mid-19th century.
That this powerful book is Nathan Harris’s debut novel is remarkable that he’s only 29 is miraculous.
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