Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst

Five friends from university; seven summer days in a lakehouse in Denmark. A chance to swim, catch up, and mess around like old times.

But the idyll is fragile. Lost without the uninhibited magic of their youth, Sylvia is left wondering what happened to the radical ways of living they embraced at university. Tensions rise under moonlit swims and wine-drenched dinners, and Sylvia is stunned to learn her old crush Esben will be getting married at the end of the week—a crush her monogamous girlfriend would definitely not approve. While the group sunbathe, cook, and flirt their way to midsummer night, new desires prove not everyone has left their arcadian fantasies behind.

An instant bestseller in Scandinavia and now translated into ten languages, Waist Deep is a modern
Midsummer Night’s Dream that offers a provocative flourish to the perennial question: does growing up have to mean giving up on your dreams?

Why I Picked It Up

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I saw this one mentioned as a minimal summer read, and I pictured something like Beth Kephart's Small Damages—smooth, lovely, sensory for its restraint, etc. with some interesting conversation. Apparently, Substack had been bubbling over this one, and I liked a lot of the European writers I've explored recently.

About the Book

When I got into Waist Deep, I started thinking about how it's basically the literary version of Emily Henry's Happy Place (which is a relatively standard premise anyway, but that I recently reread): friends reuniting for one week in which tensions and curiosities will bubble over. I knew it would likely be subdued and conversational, so was primed for that.

My Reaction

Admittedly, I rolled my eyes on the first page. Literally immediately, (one of) the main characters scratches her crotch and uses her body fluids as perfume. How provocative! It's just edgy enough to make the book tip into "literary," but I just don't have much patience for that breed of obvious. Maybe this is just me, but one of my pet peeves in litfic might just be throwing in masturbation imagery whenever a character wants to be shocking.

Then the book segues into gathering at the lake, at which point two characters announce they're getting married (again, Happy Place?) and that causes various existenial crises.

Tone & Voice

The book is slow and conversational; the existential crises remind me a little of the structure of J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, which I loved, but I found it a little insufferable. It can be far too lecturing.

I thought some points of Waist Deep could be interesting, but that they were far too stretched out and self-absorbed. On one hand, Waist Deep was intentional and self-aware about its own intellectual signaling and about "the deep need to be interesting." The characters get up in the mornings and immediately think about how to be showy: to make something impressively sophisticated in the kitchen, or lounging in a specific way meant to evoke cool effortlessness. It sounds like such a pointless way of living, but I understood why the book was making its point of circularity on that front. But does pointing out they're doing it for the aesthetic absolve the narrative of...only being aesthetic, and not even being passably so? I was expecting more sensation then, or more beauty unfurled.

“Are you just making a scene to make yourself seem interesting?”

“It's too quiet. Should they have music on? Would that be too staged?”

Characters & Development

Sylvia, one of the characters, is really just something out of a Milan Kundera book: unable to stomach the idea of commitment, and backed into her paradox of choice; she envisions all of the friends becoming polyamorous because she loves her girlfriend Charlie but doesn't want to be tied down. She's always crushed on the friend getting married, Estan, and admires his family history of mental illness as being appropriately tragic. (Again, perhaps true that some to think this way, but it felt pretty faux-edgy to see on the page.)

“It fills Sylvia with a strange, reverent envy, the thought of Esteban's proximity to true insanity. She fears that her own nettling mental health isn't great but in a less interesting way.”

Perhaps an unfair read, but this book wanted so badly to be literary that I almost think it lost the quality.

Waist Deep mostly focused on Sylvia and Quince; the other characters felt vastly underdeveloped, which made Sylvia's insistence that they should all be in love a little surprising. Do you even know or like any of them? There was little affection directed towards others, mostly because she was wildly solipsistic. I think her obsession with creating a commune—as the book's conflict largely revolves around Sylvia wishing they would all be polyamorous together, and how that would rescue her from all her own problems—would have landed if she'd in any way noticed anyone else beyond them being accessories, even if that may have been part of the point.

Her push for polyamory, and the way it happened, was actually so annoying, although it did start maybe the (1) interesting conversation of the book. She could not at all even conceive of the idea that her perception of love and romance might be different from others', and that made it hard to even want to read because it was just pointlessly childish? Like, I felt for her in her moments of doubt, but it was repetitive and not in an intriguing way (as I do think that you can write repetitive characters without being dull!) And the characters point it out, and Sylvia does herself, but it's so...again, telegraphed...that the themes don't feel all that interesting.

“Why does everything have to be so alternative and complicated?”

That's sort of why I thought it might be a better short story though—the significance of Waist Deep could have been distilled into a scene.

Explorations of Gender & Connection

I did enjoy Quince's exploration of gender identity, mostly because I'm very straight and hetero, so although I'm sure some of this conversation could be surface-level, it was new to me.

The book is technically loosely inspired by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, an influence I understood and agreed with, and the most poignant or atmospheric element of the book was Quince's spiritual alignment with Puck's playful, mercurial energy; it had excellent fey bargaining and trickery.

The rest sort of fell apart for me. There were some good parts, but it was hard to get over how insufferable Sylvia was. Her affection for Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Sylvia Plath made a lot of sense; I'm not saying anyone who likes those book is like Sylvia, but that the romanticization of the fig tree and whatnot went exactly how I thought.

Lines & Value

While I liked certain lines in Waist Deep, I just thought there wasn't much to it. I thought there would be more complexity to the characters. I liked its meta-awareness about the desire for complexity and abstraction and performative intellectualism (the book talks a lot about it being a gathering of intellectual-types in that they all "worship subtle irony") but I didn't think it was vivid like I was promised (i.e. feeling summery.)

“How charming that he reads classics, that he doesn't pretend to like them but has his own opinions.”

Fundamentally, I put in so much effort to find things to like to the extent that I really, really tried. Might even be unfair to other books I pick up and don't extend this generosity to! Which means it was overall just so flat to me.

I think Waist Deep would have been a lot stronger as a story or novella, because it didn't fill enough as a book, even a short one; it dragged, and the lectures and circularity were genuinely insufferable and pretentious. It's like being lectured at by your most annoyingly out-there friend, or scrolling through various cities' roommate listings with a laundry list of requirements. A normal conversation is called mansplaining.

“And what does Adam look like? A propaganda poster for the superiority of the Aryan race, its natural, Germanic predatory instincts.”

Picky, also, but the dialogue and internal narration read to me as so telegraphed. Like, "Ah, yes, to the lakehouse—which we have been looking forward to since moving into our new apartment—we go! Remind me why we wanted to see X friend again?" Even when poking at the desire to romanticize, perhaps showing how much the characters are aestheticizing, I'm not sure the excuse holds weight.

There were maybe one or two vivid images, and I wanted more. It's floaty enough that it wouldn't take you more than two hours or so to rip through. I just think other books do it better in both setting and intrigue.

Overall Thoughts

And although it was self-aware about its pretentiousness, I'm not sure that rescues Waist Deep from itself. It felt highly stereotypical, but not in a fun, indulgent way—more like a weak caricature of litfic.

Sylvia did not look at other people; even her self-consciousness about her own predilection for internal hysteria got old quickly. Quince was flighty, but I liked how they were characterized. The sexuality and the minimal European/Danish vibe was interesting, but I thought Szalay's Flesh handled similar themes in a much more interesting, weightier way. If anything, it could be somewhat similar to Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being but would just read that instead.

I wanted more from the lake and more from the connections. The one pro is that I do feel my eyes have opened a little bit more to the discussions of transness or the concerns of similar characters. The rest felt a little underbaked while simultaneously beating a dead horse? Sorry. I guess I'm not whimsical enough for this one—but if it was going whimsical, I would rather have it be more evocative?

I understand the self-consciousness of Waist Deep talking about wanting to be interesting to others, but I don't think it was interesting as a book. I could see how many might project those insecurities onto the story, though. It's horny, abstract, whatever.

Plot-wise, the ending was abrupt, and it felt so surface-level contrarian the whole way through. It talked a lot about how it was about yearning, but didn't in fact portray all that much yearning, which is what I was looking for here. In summary: literary branding is a marvel. What we call deep. And I do love the cover, which has more feel to it than any of the text. It's apparently getting a movie adaptation, which I can't particularly imagine—but maybe the atmosphere will trickle through more.