When I started writing my debut novel, Underlake, I had two primary goals: to attain a lyrical, carefully crafted prose, and to create an atmosphere for the book that was immersive, multi-layered, and inextricable from the plot. So much fiction watches its characters and their interactions closely but forgets to place them somewhere in the world. The result can be scenes that feel flat and unfinished.
I grew up in Kentucky and in mostly rural environs, where a person’s possibilities can feel as limited as the borders of the known world: these subdivisions, this strip mall, that winding road swallowed into the hills. But as a child on family road trips, I traversed the country many times and gained a sense of how much one’s environment shapes the life they can envision for themselves. When I left the country for the first time at eighteen, the experience affirmed for me that learning about new cultures and being immersed in new environments—chain of strange syllables, scent of honeysuckle, mottled island offshore—could help me live many lives, many times over.
Books can help you do that too. Great books plunge you not just into human circumstance but into the environments that formed and colored and framed that circumstance. So much of what we feel and desire every day is influenced by the room we’re in, how sunny it is, whether we can smell the ocean or glimpse mountains through the fog. A character’s experience is inextricable from where they live: the economic possibilities or lack thereof, whether they feel trapped in a dark house or a small town, how much they can see before the horizon breaks.
I’ve compiled a list of eight books that feature dreamy landscapes whose atmosphere and texture is inextricable from the lives their characters lead. Each of these has taught me some new way there is to live.
Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan
A flooded San Francisco, in which it has been raining for seven years, forms the backdrop to this gorgeous, quiet meditation on grief. The protagonist, Mia, does not just mourn the loss of her mother, who has been swept away in a flood, but also the loss of a city that still surrounds her, hidden beneath the waters swelling the streets beneath her high-rise. What makes this landscape so haunting is that it is haunted—and in a world of climate catastrophe and rising waters, its ghosts strain the limits of this book. They occupy our world too.
One of the main characters of Underlake, whose name is May, has a distinctive voice formed of her experience living in an isolated underwater community. I learned how to begin constructing May’s voice with the help of Milkman.
Much of the texture of this Burns’s book is afforded by its narrator’s singular prose, diction, and worldview. She lives during the Troubles, and seeks to do anything she can to extricate herself from her environment, even engaging in what she calls “reading-while-walking,” an exercise in being non-present. Yet one of the most haunting images from the book is when she finds herself walking home through a crumbling cityscape, engulfed in the rubble from buildings destroyed by the guerilla warfare that surrounds her daily. This is what she sees when she looks up from her book, and this rubble itself forms the texture of her speech, the terrain she must traverse to reach some semblance of a life.
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
This novel-in-verse follows a red-winged creature, Geryon, based on a character from ancient Greek myth. Autobiography of Red veers between contemporary settings—“Herakles and Geryon had gone to the video store”—and textural landscapes, such as a car ride to a volcano that has always stuck with me: “jolted awake Geryon / glanced out. The world had gone black and bulbous. Shiny ropes of old lava / rose and fell in every direction / around the car which had come to a halt. … The lava emitted / a glassy squeak and he jumped.” The book achieves tenuous balance between earthly and surreal, and is tinged with the color of Geryon’s wings, even “the dark pink air.”
This book taught me how much a particular character’s perspective and even their physicality can tint the environment itself, how they influence each other. Underlake is braided with watery metaphor constructed by the characters’ own experience of the world.
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
I first read this book beside the Columbia River in Oregon. We stayed several nights in a room overlooking the Bridge of the Gods, having finally escaped our one-room apartment in Seattle after months of pandemic-induced isolation. Each night, the light clotted into an orange dusk, and we watched a pair of ospreys building their nest on the bridge’s highest chords.
This is a book about a lake in the Western United States, about the muddy town sloping down to that lake, a book inflected by the language of its speaker and the mind that creates that language. It explores how a human consciousness constructs and interprets its environment, how very distinct that interpretation can be from anyone else’s. The lake in this book is therefore imbued with a kind of mysticism and magic that I’ve experienced nowhere else. It’s a transformative read.
Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove
Thomas and Beulah is the book-length story in verse of a couple living through the Great Migration. Much of the atmosphere of the book is formed by the movement of a river and its interaction with the musical instruments that the characters play. The book’s lyrical texture and imagistic scope are particular to the historical period and the experiences of its characters, inextricable from a landscape that they must traverse to reach a new life.
El cuarto de atrás (The Back Room) by Carmen Martín Gaite
I spent much of my time growing up in a small, rural town, and a sense of claustrophobia pervades much of my work. In Underlake, small groups of people have been living underwater for years in a chain of houses and commercial buildings at the bottom of lake. The particularity of their settings has informed what their communities have become, culturally and socially.
One of the books about isolation that has stuck with me most is Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás. In this novel, woman living in the latter years of Francoist Spain is visited by a strange man, whose presence stirs up memories of her youth. Martín Gaite uses the claustrophobia of the protagonist’s apartment, in which she spends almost the entire novel, to reflect the sense of oppression and suffocation that the protagonist experienced growing up as a woman in Catholic Nationalist Spain. Even as she recalls the salty air and bathhouses along the beaches of her youth, these images are filtered through a compressed prose that embodies the traumas of living under fascism.
This book lives inside the irreparably damaged mind of McGlue, an alcoholic sailor with a head injury that’s left his skull agape. The vertiginous sway of the ship beneath him as he sobers up, as the crew starts to confront him with accusations that he’s killed his best friend—there could be no better setting to reflect the tenuous tightrope of reality McGlue walks over the course of the novel, all his contradictory memories seething below. The book is tarred with dried blood, soured with whiskey, gnarled as the wood in the deck of the ship.
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley
This incomparable novel-in-verse gasps with its own music. Notley’s feminist odyssey follows the descent of a character named Alette through subway tunnels and caves, encountering talking animals and sinister creatures on her mission to confront a Tyrant. The expanding and contracting shadows of these tunnels are claustrophobic and all-consuming. It’s a hero’s journey inextricably rooted in the geography of its fantastical world.
The characters in Underlake aspire to something similar, driving deeper and deeper under the water, seeking a path to freedom and open air. It is in some ways its own feminist odyssey—but where the terrain is different, the journey must be different also.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Erin L. McCoy is the author of the poetry collection Wrecks, a finalist for the Noemi Press Book Award. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Narrative, Conjunctions, Bennington Review, The American Poetry Review, and Best New Poets, among other publications. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Erin has lived in Seattle, Malaysia, Spain, and two St. Petersburgs.