NONFICTION - May 17, 1992

WATER AND LIGHT by Stephen Harrigan (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 270 pp.). By the age of 14, Stephen Harrigan was so obsessed with dolphins that he pretended to be a professional naturalist in order to request from a director of Marineland “any information you might be inclined to share with me regarding the maintenance of Tursiops truncatus in captivity.” The obsession never left him, though it broadened to encompass all underwater life, to the point that Harrigan (author of the novels “Aransas” and “Jacob’s Well”) wanted to become nothing less than a water baby. “Water and Light” is Harrigan’s account of a few months spent diving in the Caribbean, mostly off Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos islands, in an attempt to understand his “underwater self.” The result is a surprisingly flat, static book that reads as if Harrigan wanted to imitate in prose the slow, deliberate, sometimes dream-like movements of a diver. The novelist has a number of interesting encounters, above water and below, but they tend to be with the usual suspects: sharks, eels, whales, octopi, ugly Americans, embarrassed neophytes, treasure hunters, carefree but skilled natives. “Water and Light” suffers, in short, from the fact that Harrigan’s prose isn’t distinctive or lively enough to compete with the images we’ve already seen on countless television documentaries. His best line, and it’s a good one: “Going to Grand Cayman and not letting a dozen stingrays slither over your body was like going to London and not seeing the changing of the guard.”