Books January 7, 2019 Issue

A Twisted Fairy Tale About Toxic Masculinity

Sophie Mackintosh’s début novel, “The Water Cure,” is a dystopian coming-of-age story.

By Laura Miller
December 31, 2018

L
ike all dystopian narratives, the feminist variety uses stories about how bad the world might become to point out how bad it
already is. Not surprisingly, feminist dystopian narratives are now enjoying a boom, from Hulu’s television adaptation of
Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale”—Atwood recently announced that she is writing a sequel—to several
books by both new and established novelists, including Louise Erdrich’s “Future Home of the Living God,” Christina Dalcher’s
“Vox,” and Leni Zumas’s “Red Clocks.” These writers depict a range of inventively punitive societies: in one, women are punished
for speaking more than a hundred words per day; in another, the government takes pregnant women into custody to manage a
fertility crisis. The novels extrapolate from a very real prospect of curtailed rights, especially reproductive rights, to imagine what it
would be like to live in a society of forced marriages and pregnancies. The typical dystopian novel is at least as much about the
world it’s set in as it is about the characters who inhabit it.

Sophie Mackintosh’s clever and arresting début novel, “The Water Cure” (Doubleday), although sometimes grouped with the new
crop of feminist dystopias, doesn’t much resemble them in this respect. It constructs not a world but a bubble within a world—in
other words, a family. Three young sisters live with their parents in a decommissioned seaside sanatorium that was once a grand
hotel. They have no contact with the outside; their father, King, leaves in a motorboat every few months to bring back supplies
from a mainland they believe to be dangerously contaminated. Men are the primary source of the toxins, and the two elder sisters
can remember when their parents provided a sanctuary for “damaged women,” refugees who had been harmed by the male world.
The therapies employed were harsh and primitive: patients were ordered to drink salt water until they vomited, and the titular
“water cure” entailed a near-drowning. After the patients stop coming, King and his wife, Mother, administer the same cures to
their daughters, observing elaborate purification measures whenever the girls come into contact with dead animals or a particularly
noxious artifact from the greater world, such as a magazine. Other regular treatments include being shrouded or gagged with lots
of muslin; the characters in “The Water Cure” always seem to be running off to collect a bolt of the stuff.

The middle sister, Lia, narrates the novel’s long central section. It comes bracketed by clusters of short chapters narrated by the
Sophie Mackintosh’s début concerns three sisters brought up in fear and isolation. Photograph by Niall McDiarmid for The New Yorker
eldest, Grace, or by all three sisters collectively, but Lia relates most of what happens after a pivotal event: King fails to return from
a supply run. Lia is the one who accepts Mother’s explanation for why her older sister is going to have a baby (“Grace asked the sea
for one”), and who, some indistinct period of time after King’s disappearance, describes how two strange men and a boy wash up
on the beach after a storm. Lia’s age isn’t clear. She herself doesn’t seem to know it. Grace has few memories of the outside world
and Lia, like her younger sister, Sky, has none. Most of what Lia knows comes from her parents. But the unreliability of King and
Mother soon becomes unignorable; we learn from Grace that every year the family holds a lottery in which a member draws an
iron marker assigning another member to be his or her “loved-most”—and, since there are five of them, one person always gets left
out. Among the cruellest tests the parents impose is to make one of the two elder sisters kill some small animal in order to spare
the youngest from being forced to do it. It’s an exercise meant to harden their hearts to everything but each other. Throughout
most of “The Water Cure,” the reader can’t tell whether the daughters really are refugees from a poisoned apocalyptic future or just
the unwitting captives of a tiny crackpot separatist cult.

Lia is a narrator familiar from many coming-of-age novels: needy, solipsistic, obsessed with her own body and feelings, absorbed in
a morbid form of femininity that prompts her to cut and burn herself. In another era, she would have been called a hysteric and
sent away to a more overtly patriarchal version of the sanatorium her parents once operated. Some readers can’t get enough of
characters like this, but I confess that Lia often exasperated me and even made me contemplate abandoning the novel once or
twice. That would have been a lamentable mistake, for Mackintosh is up to something far more interesting than a celebration of
female dysfunction. Still, I sometimes longed for the narrative reins to be returned to the more hardheaded and clear-eyed Grace.

Having drawn the short straw in the family’s most recent lottery, Lia is nobody’s loved-most. She craves tenderness so desperately
that it drives her and everyone around her half mad. “Often Grace is repelled by me,” she explains. “I don’t have the luxury of
being repelled by her, even when her breath is sour and a gentle scum of dirt clings to her ankles. I take whatever contact I can get.
Sometimes I harvest the hair from her brush and hide it under my pillow, when things get very bad.” She can think of nothing
else, even as she’s acutely aware of how dangerous her loneliness is. As her parents frame it, the sickness men cause in women takes
the form of women’s emotions. “Part of what made the old world so terrible,” Lia explains, “so prone to destruction, was a total
lack of preparation for the personal energies often called feelings. . . . Especially dangerous for women, our bodies already so
vulnerable in ways that the bodies of men are not.” The “cures” King and Mother administer are meant to purge their daughters of
all but a narrow range of feeling, making their sanctuary uncomfortably similar to nineteenth- and twentieth-century institutions
designed to render wayward girls and women mild and docile helpmeets. When Grace’s baby is born dead, Mother allows the girls
to cry for only five minutes, covered in heavy sheets, “for your grief.”

T
he humid claustrophobia of Lia’s perspective shuts out any possibility of conventional political commentary about, for
example, the perils of theocratic governments or the failure of previous generations to forestall an ecological disaster. This
insularity gives “The Water Cure” the cloistered, ahistorical atmosphere of a fairy tale, where elemental dramas play out much as
they have since humanity first began telling stories. Salt, one of the family’s go-to remedies, was traditionally reputed to keep away
malicious fairies, and the overgrown grounds Lia wanders through, with their perimeter of rusty barbed wire and shark-infested
waters, resemble Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The Shakespearean allusions—Lear-like King with his three daughters; shipwrecked
sailors delivered, “Tempest” style, into a tiny fiefdom—and the absence of any modern technology contribute to the novel’s
timeless languor. It could as easily be set fifty years ago as fifty years from now.

At first, King’s women regard the castaways with alarm. Surely they must be carriers of contagion. A moldering volume called the
Welcome Book, left over from the sanatorium days, serves to remind them of the threat; snippets of the volume are scattered
through the novel. (“Everybody knew and nobody helped. It was the secret that we were all choking on.”) Yet the newcomers have
an unself-conscious ease that fascinates Lia.

“There is a fluidity to his movements, despite his size, that tells me he has never had to justify his existence, has never had to fold
himself into a hidden thing,” she observes of one of the elder pair, Llew, “and I wonder what that must be like, to know that your
body is irreproachable.” He sizes her up as the likeliest candidate for seduction, and, of course, she succumbs:

I know that without being touched I will die. I have known it for some time. It has always felt like I need more touch than the
others anyway, my hands brushing over their shoulders or the tops of their heads as they shy away, because nobody is assigned to
me. I am not anybody’s loved-most, have not been for some time. I have gone days, weeks, without touch and when that happens I
can feel my skin thinning, I have to lay my body against grass and velvet and the corner of the sofa and rub my hands and elbows
and thighs against anything until they are raw.

One day, Mother, too, vanishes, and the old order and its barriers crumble further. The lovers sneak off into the woods for a tryst,
Lia revelling in the vulnerability she’s been raised to conquer; she finds herself “on my hands and knees and I know that bruises
will come up almost immediately, that I am thin-skinned and woundable, and somewhere within me I like this, the proof, the map
of this new joy.” But, just as she is no Miranda, Llew is no Ferdinand and theirs is no brave new world. When he begins to pull
away, the dreamy, primal language of the novel splits open on the prosaic, familiar edge of his evasions. He says things like “I hate
it when women cry. It’s manipulative” and “You’re taking precautions, aren’t you?” (She has no idea what this means, and he’s
asking way too late.) Worst of all, “I thought you might not be like the rest of them.” As Grace will later put it, “Refrain of the
man, universal: This is not my fault! See also: I absolve myself of responsibility. And: I never said that. You can’t take the actions of
my body as words.”

After the predictable ruination of Lia’s hopes comes an unexpected and thrilling turn. Wised-up Grace takes over the narration.
She addresses her account directly to King, the architect of their lives and the father of her dead child. “There has never been
anyone like you in the world,” she recalls him saying once, exulting in his own achievement in raising her and her sisters. “Well, I
wouldn’t know about that, would I?” she replies. Unlike Lia, Grace is well equipped to discover the true nature of her family’s
circumstances. But of all the revelations that follow, as the sisters prepare to dismantle the only life they’ve known, the most darkly
gratifying concerns the terrible strength that lies at the heart of Lia’s weakness. Ingenious and incendiary, “The Water Cure” is less
a warning about the way we live now, the hazardous path society is careering down, than it is about the way we have always lived,
parents and children, fathers and daughters, men and women. As the sisters put it, when they are again able to speak as one, “The
safe place had been contaminated from the start.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the January 7, 2019, issue, with the headline “The Purge.”

Laura Miller is the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia” and a books and culture
columnist at Slate.

More: Debut Novels Writers Dystopias