Grief and Survivor’s Guilt

Tara Menon’s debut novel opens with a horrifically vivid image. The narrator is at an upscale restaurant being served whole fish, when, one by one, the diners start to choke and cough, and then regurgitate pieces of a human body — fingers, ears …

Your eye rests in my palm, looking up at me, brown eyelashes curled and wet.

I was relieved when the rest of the novel turned out to be less gruesome.

The narrator turns out to be Marissa, a young woman in New York in 2012. She is a copywriter, producing trite phrases to describe vacation spots based on photographs, and her description of the job provides the only moments of levity in the novel.

Conjuring florid sentences to lure London bankers and Manhattan lawyers away from their luxury homes to the greater comforts of luxury hotels comes easily to me. […] At my desk at work, I have filled the welcome mug with adjectives scribbled on scraps of paper: isolated, secluded, pristine, untouched, gleaming, wild, cinematic, sparkling, glorious, rugged, unblemished, spotless, deserted, spellbinding, magical, crystalline, tranquil. For each photograph, I pluck out three at random and arrange them into cliches. I spend my days writing sentences like: With pristine sand and spellbinding blue water, this cinematic beach is worth the hike.

Marissa’s mother died when she was just six, and her father took her to Phuket, Thailand, where they lived on an island and worked on a marine biology project. Thailand is where Marissa found her soulmate, Arielle. Child of a grumpy white American and an elegant Thai mother, Arielle lives in the hotel they run, and the girls revel in hotel food and luxury as they grow up together.

The deep friendship between Marissa and Arielle is at the heart of this book, but alas, the relationship did not come across as special to this reader. They seemed like any pair of girls who grow up as friends. Marissa is motherless, and Arielle’s mother is warmly kind. Arielle and Marissa fight schoolyard battles together. They bicker. They get their first tattoos, matching of course, together. As they grow into teenagers, they start going to clubs together and pick up or fight off the men who assume all girls in Thailand are available for a price.

Arielle as a character is also rather lacking in depth. She is described as simply perfect. Stunningly beautiful, one who turns heads when she walks into a room, a powerful swimmer, a remarkable 5-a-side football player who outshines the boys on her team, a strong girl in every way, obviously admired by Marissa. Yet her behavior seems like that of any teenager, varying from petulant to infatuated (with the young research scientists) to irritable — we are told rather than shown that Arielle is exceptional.

The novel is told in two alternating timelines: 2004 in Thailand, and 2012 in New York. Most people will remember the Asian tsunami of 2004, and indeed there is a sense of growing tension as the Thailand chapters inch forward to that point. The opening scene in the book make it clear that Arielle perished while Marissa survived (why? Arielle was the stronger swimmer, but the book almost suggests she actively chose not to follow Marissa to shore when the tsunami hit, which mystified me).
Marissa makes a powerful statement about the intensity of this friendship, and the right to grieve the loss of a close friend as much as that of a close relative.

I hate when people say that we were like sisters. She was not my sister. You don’t get to choose your sister. We chose each other, […] It is not acceptable to grieve someone who is just a friend. […] People have told me that I shouldn’t mourn her like this. Or else they ask Were you in love with her? As if that could be the only explanation for this kind of grief.

Eight years later, Marissa is still haunted by Arielle, and Hurricane Sandy threatens New York. Will the lashing winds and water in the city finally give her some closure?

Marine biology, and the fate of the sea creatures who are hunted, tortured and exploited are interspersed through the book, and they are beautifully described, especially the manta rays. Also lovely are the island images.

The leaves are still heavy from the rain. Water drips off the trees and falls in small streams onto the soft ground. A light breeze cradles the wet branches. Mud gives way under our feet. Black butterflies emerge from the shadows. We leave deep uneven tracks with each step and I have to focus to keep from slipping. The light is starting to caress the plants of the understory.

New York City is not ignored. The Carolina parakeets who live wild in the city and the invasive slider turtles in Central Park each get pages on their origins, behavior and future. The human denizens are included too — a subway ride includes descriptions of at least a dozen NY residents who are unrelated to the plot. At some point, this merely becomes distracting background, despite the good writing,

Over 200,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand died in that natural disaster. This book did not succeed in making me feel the death of Arielle or the trauma and guilt of Marissa more than that suffered by any other of the victims and survivors.

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Under the Water

Tara Menon

Riverhead Books, 2026