Lawrence Sutin’s slim and stark fiction, When to Go Into the Water, is probably one of the most accessible avant-garde books ever written. One is tempted to call it “experimental pop,” the result of a precise and frankly gorgeous talent.

Sutin’s collection of vignettes, which move back and forth through time from World War I to the mid-21st century, creates a cumulative narrative effect that is equal parts bildungsroman and metaphysical pamphlet. Sutin leads his protagonist, the unflappable Hector de Saint-Aureole, through calamities both historical and personal, with sumptuous language that somehow never manages to surrender its economy. Instead, it achieves a pitch-perfect tone that deftly modulates between the comic and profound. The result is as fluid and immersive as the image of water that is the book’s recurring obsession.
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In discrete, delightfully composed vignettes, Sutin, a biographer of Aleister Crowley and Philip K. Dick, tells the rags-to-riches story of a French peasant farmer. Born in 1900 on a farm in eastern France, Hector de Saint-Aureole, the humble protagonist of this clever pseudobiography, gravitates first to Paris, where he works as a renderer in an abattoir, then to London, where he becomes a barman in Bloomsbury. Luck strikes the young man in the form of a friendship with a Scotsman who dies and leaves Hector his considerable estate: “a fortune to assure a lifetime of ease and choice.” Hector sets out to explore the world, determined to leave a record of his passage, which takes the shape of his life's opus, When to Go into the Water. Sutin alternates this factual-sounding narrative of Hector's journeys with more contemporary dispatches about readers who have over the decades come upon Hector's work, e.g., “a fading male movie star of the 1990s.” It's fascinating to watch Sutin turn his biographer's wiles toward fiction, and the result is charmingly original and intelligent.

“This book is a time machine. Sutin’s use of imaginary responses from an imaginary audience to an imaginary book by an imaginary author in When To Go Into The Water creates an entertaining, scattershot trajectory.” To read the full review, click here.