Water Music

''Water Music'' by T. Coraghessan Boyle is set in the decade between 1795 and 1805, it very deliberately goes about mimicking and mocking the novels of both the 18th and 19th centuries....The style of the new book is a freewheeling mixture of elegant polysyllabic rhetoric (''porcipophagic,'' ''testudineous'') with current colloquialismsThese two forms of discourse, the rhetorical and the chatty, occur in both high plot and low plot, and they occur together: ''So long, mortal coil''; ''Orestes couldn't have had it worse''; ''But hey, this is Africa, man. The eye of the needle, mother of mystery, heart of darkness.'' Humor? I'm not so sure....The intention of such writing is, I think, not precisely humor; its intention is to limn the characters of another century with the most colorless expressions of our own in order to make them recognizable, to make them look and feel like ourselves.... ''Water Music,'' while self-consciously honoring certain codes and manners of the past, goes out of its way to keep us aware that we are reading a work of our own times. -- New York Times


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