My manager’s Google alert, which sends him each week a list of stories around the world that contain the phrase “polycystic kidney disease,” told him a few months ago about a novel whose main character has PKD. Guardedly curious, he found a used copy on Amazon for cheap. Before long we were both enjoying the book on many levels — I reading it when he was busy, and vice versa.
One of the functions of art is to convey the feeling that someone else has felt what we have felt — that we’re not alone in our fear, our anger, our lust, our sadness, or whatever feelings make us feel out of step with the expressions we see on the faces of the people around us. And one of the things that’s difficult about PKD is that so few people have ever heard of it. It can be lonely, having cysts. (And lonelier still being a giant kidney with cysts. It’s rare for me even to run into a giant kidney without cysts.)
What a pleasure, then, to read a clever, thoughtful, poignant novel whose narrator is dealing with the same cysts that trouble me. His mother died young of PKD, as many of my manager’s relatives have done. The narrator’s trips to dialysis; the annoying and sometimes desperate attention he has to pay to his diet; his constant awareness of the shortage of kidneys for those who need them; his upset feelings that so few of his friends are willing to donate their organs even after their deaths; the dark impulses he feels as he watches a motorcyclist and imagines him falling, dying, giving up at last the kidney the narrator so desperately needs: for a person with PKD, to read “The Waters of Thirst” is to feel understood.
And understood in a way that is actually fun. For the novel contains a multitude of pleasures. The narrative voice is consistently funny, often causing this reader to smile and sometimes laugh out loud at tidbits that had nothing to do with PKD. The narrator, a young gay Londoner during the late 1980s or early 1990s, meshes intimations of PKD-borne mortality with those same intimations delivered then by AIDS — and eventually, surprisingly, folds them together. Both diseases waste people’s energy and can take people when they’re quite young — too young, in the popular imagination, to die. Of course there’s no such thing as too young to die, but young deaths hurt us more, scare us more and cause more grief than the deaths of those old enough to have had many turns at the plate. Years ago my manager visited a man once a week for nine months as that man died of AIDS, and will never forget the way the virus destroyed him. Nor will he forget watching people he loved his whole life die of PKD.
The brilliance of Mars-Jones is his refusal either to avoid the facts of early death or to hammer them too hard. Throughout the very funny descriptions of gay porn, the eggshell-thin etiquette of dinner parties, and the dissolution of the narrator’s relationship with the loyal and likeable Terry, humor is never more than a phrase away. Here’s Mars-Jones on those motorcyclists (being British, he splits the word “motorcyclists” in two. As Mark Twain nearly said, foreigners always pronounce better than they spell):
“I mean, every vehicle is a potential accident, I realise that, but motor cyclists really are organ donors-in-waiting. A dab of grease or a handful of gravel, and a motor bike just wants a good lie down. … As time went by, I found my eyes were drawn to the rear contours of bikers’ leather jackets. The handbook recommended wearing a jacket with an extra panel of padding at waist level. It was for kidney protection. My immediate reaction was, oh yes, protect those kidneys. We don’t want anything to happen to them.”
Regardless of his motives, I wholeheartedly approve of the narrator’s urge to protect the kidneys of total strangers. I do wish more people felt as he does.
American humans are not nearly as familiar with the name Adam Mars-Jones as they should be. “The Waters of Thirst” is a marvelous book. My biases are obvious, but whether your kidneys make too many cysts or just the right number, if you’re not afraid to read descriptions of gay porn — a recurring and consistently hilarious theme — then by all means read this book. (If you can find a copy, that is: Amazon and B&N offer only used copies. That’s a real shame. This book should certainly still be in print. It’s a masterpiece.) — Kenny
