This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka.
Sure, I have a liberal arts degree or two, and those come with skills that are generally applicable (or so I’m told), but I like to think of myself as an undisciplined reader of fiction. I can approach a novel without seeing it strictly through the eyes of a technician or a critic (what you’re reading now is really more of a response than a review; let’s assume that is a meaningful distinction).
To the extent I have a systematic approach to reading novels, I try to identify what unique facet of a given book I am most responding to, and pin my overall satisfaction on the element of its greatest success. The danger in this approach is that I sometimes find myself trying to identify the author’s project before they’re ready to reveal it fully. My approach probably serves me most poorly with novels that are satiric or centered on a big twist. That weakness in my methods threatened to color my reading of Julie Otsuka’s new book,
The Swimmers.
The first part of
The Swimmers concerns a large group of regular swimmers at a below ground pool, told in the collective first person. When a crack appears, there’s disagreement about what it means from the swimmers themselves, and a parade of professionals and experts who are brought in to inspect it.
I initially found myself guessing at Otsuka’s intent. Was this going to be a satire? An allegory? Was it mid-century European absurdism? Would it prove to be about the pandemic? Or climate change denial? Or a libertarian screed against big government? I’m sure it’s not unintentional, but I sometimes found that I had stopped reading because the flowing and mercurial voice of this first section had my mind wandering in the exact same way it does when I swim laps (I sometimes think of my yardage as I swim like years on a number line: “I’m entering the Middle Ages, now”).
Without spoiling anything, I don’t think that Otsuka was referring to any of those things; I think her project is deeper and more universal. It’s not a satire, but there is a twist. There’s an abrupt turn in the novel that’s almost dizzying.
The Swimmers never fully reveals itself. It’s divided into two lanes, and although they’re clearly connected, it’s left to the reader to find the ways in which they cohere into a whole.
As I’ve said, I look for the element of a novel’s greatest success, and when it comes to
The Swimmers, I am sure the momentous leap over the fissure in the book’s center is the kind of structural legerdemain that every satirist and absurdist wishes they could pull off.
Long after finishing, I’ve happily returned to
The Swimmers again and again, my mind doing laps. It’s good exercise.
Check out the rest of our Picks of the Month.