Horgan's prose in Whitewater has been called spare. Much of it is dialogue. Horgan was praised by reviewers for not intruding, for conveying the tale cleanly with controlled intensity and compassion and with hauntingly beautiful language. The title itself is a symbol of death, man's relationship to his past, and the redemption of life's continuity. Not only is it the name of an artificial lake that submerges a town but it also names the scene of Marilee's eventual suicide. The remembrance of the lost town haunts the imagination of Phil and Billy and comes to suggest a certain redemptiveness by the very fact of its permanence.

For his epigraphs to the novel Horgan chose words from a hymn ("All things whisper in the blood"), a Spanish quotation from Mexican poet Octavio Paz (translated, "Today I recall the dead of my house") and Lermontov's lament that the world fails...