The Covenant of Water: Is it a Great Book?

 Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Diversity, Quality

Is The Covenant of Water a Great Book?  Abraham Verghese seems to be positioning it as one.  It is long, the way War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov (both Great Books) are long (715 pages long); he somewhat self-consciously models the book on Moby Dick (another Great Book); and the verbiage on the cover seems to suggest that he is aiming at more than the summer reading audience.

The Covenant of Water is a book that sweeps in time from 1900 to 1977.  Though an important character is born in Glasgow, it is mostly set on the spice coast of India – the southwestern provinces, with Madras, a city on the Eastern coast, also playing a role.  The story opens with the woman who the author assures us will become a matriarch, travelling by boat from her home to an arranged marriage to become a landowner’s second wife – his first wife having died after bearing him a son.  Though she travels by water from the wedding site to her new home, her husband takes a much longer overland route, apparently because of fear of the water.

What is a Great Book? My undergraduate college’s curriculum was based on the Great Books.  The Great Books are a collection of 100 or so books, originally identified by John Erskine at Columbia in 1921, but developed by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. They were collected and published in a standardized English translation form by the Encyclopedia Britannica Corporation in 1952. 

The Great Books are intended to be a statement of the western canon – the books that have defined civilization in the west.  They have been criticized for being too stale, pale, and male – ignoring contributions by women, minorities and our manifold recent accomplishments.

Though Verghese is male, the central protagonists are female, and he is writing about people who live in the Indian Subcontinent, though many of them are Christians living in a nation dominated by Hindu and Muslim religious, but with a great many other religious traditions beyond these big three including Jainism and Buddhism.  A central theme in the book is interreligious and interclass engagement.  

At my college, we started by reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as Plato and Aristotle – we read Euclid for math and Galen for science, and by senior year we were reading War and Peace, the Brothers K and Newton and Lobachevski for math and Einstein for science.   Moby Dick had been dropped from the curriculum during the time I was there, but we may have read Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener instead (I know I have read that short story, but I don’t remember whether it was while I was in school or not…and I’d prefer not to figure out when I read it).

The first criterion for a Great Book is that it has to have staying power.  People have to value it over time.  For this reason, there were relatively few books from the twentieth century in the curriculum when I graduated from the college in 1981.  We did study the double helix of DNA (the papers we read were published in the late 1950s) and, in general, scientific material can get in faster than material from other disciplines – but it can also cycle out more quickly.  Darwin will probably always be there, but science is, by its very nature, volatile.  We may think we have the answer, but then the world informs us otherwise.

Obviously, The Covenant of Water has not met the criterion of having been around for a while; it was only published a year or two ago.  Even though it is now a best seller, many books that start out strong, fade.  They appeal in the moment, but there has to be a theme that sustains the interest across multiple generations.  The Great Gatsby was not initially popular.  I think it grew in popularity after it was given to GIs for free during the second world war and this led to a wider readership that recognized its value (though I’m not sure if it will ever be considered a great book).  On the other hand, Shakespeare’s plays were always, as far as I know, SRO at their performances.

I think the second criteria is that it must get at an essential truth.  Theoretically, if a book does this, it will have staying power.  And one of the reasons is that we are particularly interested in the process of ferreting out that truth.  Freud is one of the authors on the Great Books list, and the books that are there are his later, philosophical/sociological books.  But frankly, it is the earliest works – even his book with Breuer on Hysteria – where he is figuring out that psychological interventions help address puzzling physiological symptoms – where the seeds of his later great discoveries lie, and I wonder if these books are more deserving of being enshrined.

In any case, despite its sweep of time, and the manifold generations of people that inhabit its pages, the plot in The Covenant of Water is pretty linear and the two great truths in the book are pretty straightforward.  The first truth is that all people need to be treated with respect.  India’s caste system is interrogated as are the wars between those of different faiths, but also the prejudices against lepers – a particularly Indian prejudice because of the prevalence of it on the subcontinent, but a pretty universally feared condition.

This is hardly the first book to address the importance of treating others with respect and kindness.  I was surprised to find that this is one of the central messages of Moby Dick when I finally picked it up this summer.  Ishmael’s love of Queequog is one of the great cross-cultural moments of acceptance.  It mirrors Huck Finn’s love of Jim, but also echoes Romeo and Juliet’s love of each other, and I recently heard an argument that Abraham’s mission statement from God in the Bible was to do good not just to the Jews, but to all people – that this was the path that was defined for him by God to help undo the pernicious evil that seems to be part and parcel of being human; evil that wasn’t eradicated by the first genocidal attempt to cleanse the human race – the Great Flood.  And, of course, it is the Great Flood that leads to the first Covenant of Water - that God will not try again to use genocide to improve the race.

The second great truth in The Covenant of Water is a very particular one.  The husband’s fear of water turns out to be one of a myriad of shared symptoms that are part of “the Condition” that is passed down within his family.  Others in his family have had a justifiable fear of water because there is a very real risk of drowning in even a small amount of water because they are disoriented by being in water and lose their ability to stabilize themselves.  They much prefer to climb trees than to be in water.  They also, over the course of their lives, slowly go deaf, and have to rely more and more on reading lips – but many of them start to lose their hearing early and never quite learn to speak as much as others – which seems to lead them to be able to hear others on a different register – to be ale to empathize with them.  They are silent empaths who don't interrupt - and, though they may miss detail, seem to get the essence.

The husband and later his son are very generous, and this generosity seems to be part of the condition, too.  The matriarch inherits a genealogy of the family and puzzles over the condition.  Her granddaughter becomes a physician and discovers the source of the malady – it is a genetic condition, an acoustic neuroma - that creates a lesion in the acoustic nerve of the afflicted and can apparently cause personality change as well.  This genetically inherited lesion – this secret malady – determines the functioning of generations of men in this family – and turns out to be an inherited, but also medically addressable issue – risky neurosurgery can improve the condition.

The author would have us believe that the secrets of a family are what bind us together – they become the covenant that holds us.  Just as God created a covenant with man after his first attempt to correct his errors by eliminating genetic variance with The Great Flood.  Having finally recognized his kinship with humans, God had to find a new way of coming to grips with man’s humanity fallibility through Abraham; so, in this version, we come to love family members not in spite of their inflictions, but because of them.  The mess that we are is a part of what makes us lovable – not something that leads to isolation and to shame.

Verghese is a physician and, as far as I can tell, a lovely person.  He embraces people in all of their variety.  He does not turn away from people with afflictions that cause me to recoil.  He depicts people in this book with huge goiters – and his detailed descriptions of the goiter and of the surgical treatment draw us to look at these people, not to look away.  Similarly, his depictions of leprosy and the ways in which the truly debilitating aspects of the illness are that it robs people of the “gift of pain” so that they start to harm their bodies because they no longer get the feedback that they should stop doing harmful things is heart-rending and evokes a kind of empathy I didn’t know I could experience for lepers.  Apparently, in his position as a professor of medicine at Stanford, Verghese teaches bedside manner to young physicians, and I am glad that he is the person that is doing this.  I think he can train people to see through the blood and guts and to see the human before them.

But I think this book, because it is seen through his eyes, forces us to imagine a world that is prettier than the one most of us imagine.  Through all of its twists and turns, through all of the dreadful conditions that he confronts us with, we are led by a guide who wants us to feel what we feel from a position of hope – with the reassurance that these terrible things all have a meaning – he reassures us that there is a web of meaning – a sense that we belong to this family – this family in India, but also to the family of man and that, as a member of that family, we are and should be joyful.  Thank God, we should say, that we are human.

In this sense, he feels akin to Stephen Spielberg.  I feel that I am being guided in this book by a man like Spielberg who wants to make me feel uncomfortable things - he wants me to cry and to be uplifted - but he also wants me to know that, in the end, everything will work out.  His characters are, for the most part, good people who are caught in bad situations.  We are not confronted, as we are in the Brothers Karamazov, with an Inquisitor - a priest - who would condemn a reincarnated Jesus to death all over again because he, the priest, knows better what the people really need.

I am aware at this moment that in my writings here, I often take a similar position.  I think that Verghese and I share an outlook.  But I think this outlook that we share may keep us from acknowledging the intensity of the experience of being kept out of that family – the despair of not knowing.  The depth of being other in a world that doesn't allow us, on a primal level, to feel joined.  In our attempt to reassure the reader, we may miss connecting with the despair that is at the center of the human condition – and this may be the third criterion for a Great Book – that it has to capture something not just of the capacities of the human condition, but of its limits – and crushing experience of realizing those limits.  The reality of the situation is that, after 77 years that included gaining independence and surviving two world wars, India is more like itself than not.  The old prejudices survive.

I haven’t finished Moby Dick.  I got bogged down in the middle where Melville is explaining how whaling ships work for a couple of hundred pages.  I trust that when I pick it up again, the maniacal pursuit of the white whale will draw me back in.  The grand-daughter in The Covenant of Water who discovers the family secrets – including the secret of her birth – is the Captain Ahab of this tale – seeking out the truth of the family condition.  These discoveries bring her joy – and a sense that the world fits together neatly.  Somehow she manages to stay above the fray – and part of what makes a book great is the process of joining into the fray.  Letting it take us precisely where we don’t want to go.

As I drive across southern Ohio in 2024 and see a myriad of signs supporting Trump for president, I think of how far, and not so far our country has come.  The populist taps into our darker selves and makes us feel alright about having those dark thoughts; including expressing and acting on them.  The populist nurtures darkness and encourages us to protect it onto others.  Verghese is striving to do the opposite; but pretending that our darkness is not there leaves us unarmed in the fight against it.  We puzzle at the characters who remain mired in antiquated views, for instance towards women.  We do not interrogate them as closely as we do the goiters in this novel.  We are not prepared to know them and the arteries that feed them, we believe that good will outweigh the bad in the end - that the arc of history bends inevitably towards justice - as if that will happen on its own, not through a surgical interaction with a pathogen whose existence need to be understood so that we can wrestle with it, not out there, with those who disagree with us, but in here, in our hearts, where we know that we are not all that we pretend to be.

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