On the Shelf
The Swimmers
By Julie Otsuka
Knopf: 192 pages, $23
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Does the neighborhood pool have magical powers? It’s simple to suppose so, studying the opening part of Julie Otsuka’s third novel, “The Swimmers.” The guide begins with a quirkily exultant 30-page ode, relayed within the first individual plural and full of the writer’s signature lists. “In our ‘actual lives,’” Otsuka writes, “we're overeaters, underachievers, canine walkers, cross-dressers, compulsive knitters (Only one extra row), secret hoarders, minor poets, trailing spouses, twins, vegans, ‘Mother,’... .” However as soon as within the water, swimmers are solely “one among three issues: fast-lane individuals, medium-lane individuals or the sluggish.”
At this subterranean pool in an unnamed college city, water has a radical impact. It exerts its buoyant pressure on our bodies, easing ache and making the outdated really feel younger. Swimmers discover escape from the “traditional aboveground afflictions” — knee issues, habit, heartbreak. Variations amongst individuals are washed clear. Guidelines are a consolation, as a result of they imply that the pool is all the time the identical: a refuge from noise, household, work, the web, the “too-bright solar beating down by way of the tattered cover of the timber.”
The cultish devotion amongst Otsuka’s swimmers typically strains credulity. Do the interlopers who briefly be a part of the pool in January to shed vacation kilos actually say “Out of my means, girl” to poor candy Alice, who has dementia? Would a swimmer who seeks to hoard the mysteries of the pool, moderately than share them with a curious accomplice, ever really change the topic by asking, “Why do you suppose these dinosaurs actually disappeared?”
We get it: Pool individuals are all in. Laborious core. However Otsuka, who's well-known for her two earlier novels, “When the Emperor was Divine” and “The Buddha within the Attic,” is as much as greater than mere amusement. A grasp of shifting perspective, she is getting ready us for a rift.
Simply because the reader settles into this amusing, intimate examine of a microcosm, a crack seems on the wall of the pool and the guide makes a flip flip. At first, the swimmers “mistake it for one thing else: a bit of string, a size of wire, a scratch on the outer lens of our goggles.” However the crack is actual, a literal fault line within the fantasy world of the pool.
Although “now not than a baby’s forearm,” the crack lodges itself within the swimmers’ minds, and the neighborhood promptly disintegrates round it. Right here, “The Swimmers” jogged my memory of “Determined Characters,” Paula Fox’s taut 1970 novel, the place a chew on the hand from a stray cat unravels a lady’s life over the course of a weekend.
One vital distinction is that Otsuka treats the omen with humor, infusing the narrative with the absurdist high quality of a small-town thriller. There are subterranean constructions specialists and aquatics commissioners. A swimmer who's a medical claims adjuster calls the crack a preexisting situation. “Oy,” I groaned, on the rabbi who says the crack is “however a minor misfortune in a protracted string of steady woes.” These characterizations are flattening, however Otsuka is all the time poetic too: “Final evening I dreamed I had a splinter in my eye,” says one character.
The individual most affected by the crack is Alice, the common lap swimmer with dementia, who experiences flashbacks to her wartime childhood incarceration in a camp for Japanese People. Alice turns into the middle of the novel, and her presence appears to be the one connection between the 2 compelling however disjointed halves of this guide. One part within the second half, referred to as “Diem Perdidi,” Latin for “I've misplaced a day,” is an exhaustive abstract of all that Alice can and can't keep in mind relayed by her daughter. (“She remembers that the daughter who was born earlier than you lived for half an hour after which died.”)
The next part, “Belavista,” finds Alice in a long-term reminiscence residence by this identify (off a freeway, by a mall). Most of this part is addressed to “you” (Alice) and delivered by a unique and extra elusive “we” than the guide’s first half. Presumably, it’s the ability itself or some group of representatives therein, however on this occasion Otsuka’s play with perspective may be barely complicated. Generally it’s omniscient, typically extra particular (possibly Alice’s daughter)? Finally it doesn’t make constant sense.
However, a theme coheres. Descriptions of Belavista type a grim counterpoint to the freedoms of the pool. The frustrations of life “up there,” which fell away in Alice’s 35 years of swimming, type the substance of daily on the residence. With regards to who you have been earlier than, in your so-called actual life, “No person is aware of and no person cares,” Otsuka writes.
It’s the form of paradoxically hyper-surveilled however deeply lonely existence we affiliate with jail. Nightlights come on mechanically at eight o’clock each evening (“you'll by no means expertise complete darkness once more”). There's a Life Enrichment Supervisor named Jessica. Otsuka is a grasp of heartbreaking element, and the reader feels sentenced, together with Alice, to this dreary, for-profit final cease.
Each of Otsuka’s earlier novels take care of the internment of Japanese People throughout World Conflict II. The profoundly shifting “Buddha within the Attic,”which wona PEN/Faulkner Award and was nominated for a Nationwide E-book Award in 2011, is about Japanese “image brides” who got here to America to marry males they’d by no means met and who labored as migrant laborers or domestics in white houses in California.
“Buddha” can also be written in first-person plural, to devastating impact. Women and girls endure a harrowing oversea journey adopted bythe disappointments of assembly typically a lot older husbands, in addition to sexual violence, poverty, exploitation and racism. They increase American kids solely to grow to be a supply of embarrassment for his or her cussed accents or the meals they pack in class lunches.
In “The Swimmers,” Otsuka makes use of the first-person plural — the resounding fashion of grand oratory, political pamphlets and fundraising appeals — to enumerate the dizzying specificities of human lives. Her packed paragraphs are often-thrilling compilations of element, even when she’s simply itemizing objects misplaced on the backside of a pool (cotton balls, marriage ceremony rings, German marks).
The novel is full of these tender assemblages, a declarative refrain of human tastes, reminiscences and woes. However the proliferation of element in “The Buddha within the Attic” grants depth and sorrow to its characters. That’s a feat solely achieved within the later sections, the place Alice’s life comes into focus.
For all of its expansive particulars, “The Swimmers” is usually twee in its first half. Even because it offers with “aboveground” troubles like dementia, the world of the guide — talking of lives suspended in water — feels a bit like a snow globe. Its often-captivating insularity will also be cloying at instances. As in her earlier work, the heavier the themes, the extra Otsuka’s language lifts off. As soon as we're squarely in Alice’s world, “The Swimmers” sparkles.
Aron is the writer of “Good Morning, Destroyer of Males’s Souls: A Memoir of Girls, Habit, and Love.”
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