A Conversation with Lauren Acampora about The Hundred Waters

You’ve often written about class anxiety in suburbia. In The Hundred Waters, there is also a layer of environmental anxiety. Can you talk about why this backdrop is so useful for examining our climate crisis?

One reason is that it’s home. I grew up in a Connecticut suburb much like Nearwater, and I now live in a New York suburb that’s not hugely different. I’m continually drawn to this setting in my fiction because it’s eminently familiar and also because it’s the sort of place that lulls residents into warm feelings of comfort and control. The lush suburban town of Nearwater in The Hundred Waters is so beautiful and well-maintained that it’s almost unearthly. The quest for tranquility, privacy, and aesthetic perfection is powerfully enabled by serious money. People operate under the impression that ease and beauty can be purchased, that by cultivating a tight sphere of influence one might earn the right to shut out the greater world and its conflicts and conflagrations. There’s an underlying delusion that the climate crisis couldn’t ever reach this place—a place so beautiful, safe, and permanent.

But beneath such delusion lurks a great deal of anxiety. The anticipation of coming catastrophe must be continually quashed. The news headlines are a drumbeat of calamity: forest fires, floods, hurricanes. The truth is that the climate crisis is at the door, whether of a mobile home or a gated stone estate. This can be thought of as an offshoot of class anxiety, in a way. Class can’t protect you, in the end. In the case of the Raders, their high-design home is literally made of glass. Although their immediate surroundings are curated and manicured, the family is largely exposed and vulnerable to the outside. Richard, the husband-architect, in a hubristic temptation of fate, has purposefully designed the house this way. They live in a vitrine, and a vein of apprehension underlies their everyday lives. Their house is fragile, just as their home life is fragile; their peaceful world can very suddenly shatter.

This novel is deeply preoccupied with art and the art world, and you come from an artistic background and family yourself. Have you always wanted to write about art?

For me, art came first. My father was an art dealer and painter from a line of Italian artists, and from him I learned the classical techniques of drawing from life, how to see things are they really are: shapes of dark and light. Drawing and painting gave me a taste of the quasi-religious experience of flow: wordless, thoughtless, instinctive. When I began to write poems and stories, it was a different kind of exaltation—from the power of unfettered imagination, the ability to string words together into any scenario or fable at all. For a long time, I did both art and writing without making myself choose. I spent happy hours in my airy, sunlit college studio, but eventually I banged up against the limits of my classical training. I couldn’t seem to make the leap into original, imaginative production. There was exciting art in my head, but I couldn’t manage to get it out in a satisfying way. The fact that I finally gave up trying might have also had something to do with my dislike of the jobs that came with art: stapling canvases onto wooden stretchers and priming them. I didn’t love lugging out the supplies or dealing with the paint tubes and turpentine. I tried photography, video, and digital art, but again was stymied by materials. The dark-room process drove me nuts, and I felt alienated by the technicalities of video and digital art.

Instead, I wrote. All I needed was pen and paper. In New York, I brought my notebook with me everywhere and wrote in parks and the subway and the MoMA courtyard. I found that being around art lit me up—absorbing the varied styles and media and general wildness. I rediscovered the rush I’d first felt as a child when I realized I could invent anything with words. I could produce any story, any image in a reader’s mind, in the simplest possible way. I realized I could channel my fascination with artists into my writing. Artists are often obsessive, and obsessives are my favorite characters. I could temporarily be an artist myself while writing about them. I could brazenly make artwork on any scale, without the restrictions of space and time or expensive materials—beaming big, ambitious pieces out of my head and directly into readers’ minds without getting out of my chair. In my short stories, I’ve mounted a large-scale photography exhibition and filled a Chelsea gallery with taxidermy art. In The Wonder Garden, I covered a mansion with individually sculpted rubber insects. In The Paper Wasp, I built an indoor stingray tank in a bathroom. In The Hundred Waters, I made public art installations, spray-painted a wall mural, screened video art, and covered an entire building with turf.

The Austrian visual artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser figures prominently in the book and the character Gabriel’s environmentalism. How did his work come to have such a central role in the novel?

My husband introduced me to Hundertwasser on our first date. I’d mentioned that I needed plants in my apartment, and Thomas told me about this Austrian artist who’d written about the importance of greenery in city dwellings, and who called plants “tree tenants.” After the date, he sent me the catalog from KunstHausWien, the museum in Vienna that houses much of Hundertwasser’s work. The artwork was so colorful and manic, with feverish paintings and carnivalesque buildings sprouting trees from their windows and roofs. Beyond his prodigious artistic and architectural output, he also designed utopian city plans, postage stamps, flags, and license plates that reflected his environmental concerns. I was particularly struck by his plans for villages covered with turf, dwellings incorporated into rolling land.  He had a casketless natural burial in New Zealand, where his body joined directly with earth in a plot he called the “Garden of the Happy Dead.”

The very first spark for The Hundred Waters came to me during the height of my fascination with Hundertwasser. I wanted to create a modern-day protégé, a young artist attempting to fashion himself in that image, and with a similar preoccupation with nature and the sovereignty of the earth. The name the artist gave himself, Hundertwasser, translates to “hundred waters,” and so he seemed a fitting totem for a young person who thinks of himself as a kind of ark-building Noah figure. Gabriel wants to sound the alarm about coming disaster, specifically the rising sea levels and flooding of climate change—but he also invites (and ultimately creates) disaster as a righteous punishment for humankind, which he considers a selfish, arrogant, gluttonous species.

What other art or movies or books helped you shape The Hundred Waters?

The first notions for the novel originally came to me in a dream. It wasn’t so much as a story as a series of images, a kind of aesthetic tone. I tried to infuse the novel with those original visual elements. From an imagistic angle, artists whose work influenced the book include Bill Viola, Nan Goldin, and Robert Mapplehorpe.

Ancient earthworks were a big inspiration for this book and for Gabriel’s character, in particular Irish burial cairns, the giant white horses carved in chalk in England, and the early Native American effigy mounds that were shaped like animals, such as Serpent Mound in Ohio and Great Bear Mound in Iowa.

As for movies, the setting of American Beauty and the character of Ricky, the philosophical teenaged artist boy, probably shaded the book. The same goes for The Ice Storm, novel and movie both. Other films set in New York City’s art and club scene may have had some influence on my concept of Louisa, like High Art, After Hours, and Downtown 81.

Having grown up in the Catholic church, the stories of the Bible are a strong force in Gabriel’s life and artwork, especially the tales of impending disaster: the great flood, Christ’s last supper, and of course the apocalypse. He models much of his art on the Book of Revelation’s beasts of doom. And for me, Kierkegaard’s writings were a grounding element in the novel, especially his notion of the Knight of Faith: an impossible figure who paradoxically inhabits both the finite and infinite simultaneously—total despair and complete faith at once.

The role of animals is so powerful and nearly surreal in this story. There is also a kind of Tiger King character, Roy Fox, who keeps exotic animals on his private estate. How did this character come to you?

I wrote a short story about Roy Fox before he entered the novel. He’s a retired oil executive who collects exotic animals on the outskirts of a well-heeled suburban town. The original inspiration came from a gorgeous estate near my home that contains a great variety of surprising creatures, and where my young daughter once had a run-in with a wildcat. In subsequent drafts of the novel, it occurred to me that Gabriel could be involved with this estate. To him, the retired oil executive Roy Fox would represent the intractable wickedness of the powerful, those who refuse to halt the global emergency and instead worsen it.

Do you write all of your fiction into the same universe?

I haven’t set out to do this, but it keeps happening. Connections suggest themselves to me, and I can’t resist following them. I find myself “inventing” characters who soon reveal themselves to be characters I already know. The Hundred Waters and The Wonder Garden (my first book of linked stories) weren’t originally conceived as taking place in neighboring towns, but it occurred to me that of course they were. That’s when I began letting characters from The Wonder Garden poke into the novel, taking on cameo roles and insinuating themselves into the book via local lore. Even Auguste Perren, the reclusive film director from The Paper Wasp, has a small part in the book in the form of a still photograph at the art center gala. I think it’s delightful when authors link characters, places, and events throughout their body of work. As I work on and consider new projects, I find myself imagining what roles my pre-existing characters might play in them. I’d love to keep expanding this loosely cohesive world so that more characters and events are mapped and have the freedom to return in ways that surprise a reader, and me.