The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka, pub. Knopf
Julie Otsuka’s great gift is to telegraph the experience of the individual through a collective voice so delicate one feels there is no permutation of the human condition that cannot be universally felt. The nameless characters in When the Emperor was Divine (Otsuka’s 2002 debut novel), for example, act as chilling ventriloquists of the plight of Japanese-Americans inhumanely contained within internment camps in the 1940s.
In The Swimmers, Otsuka’s long-awaited third novel, she again invites us into the lives of characters whose specific realities reverberate with far-reaching resonance.
In the beginning, we hear from a plural voice that describes the near-manic obsession a group of swimmers have with their underground local pool. More than the site of leisurely recreation, the pool is their raison d’être.
Chinese-American novelist Celeste Ng still seeking her Hong Kong story
They swim there with unflagging devotion, often neglecting aspects of their lives “up above” to spend time in a place where they feel an almost magical sense of meaning. “Up there,” one of the swimmers says, “I’m just another little old lady. But down here, at the pool, I’m myself.”
The other swimmers feel the same way, coveting their time in the water with almost religious zeal. The certainty and clarity of being in the pool is an anomalous gift alongside the tedium of real life, so whether they are a former Olympian, an actor, or Alice, the older woman edging towards dementia, they are equals within the reassuring boundaries of the pool’s rigidly demarcated lanes.
But then the unthinkable happens. The pool develops a small crack that slowly gives rise to new ones so that, eventually, it closes for good, leaving the swimmers lost in a morass of hopelessness. There is no replacement possible for the one thing they loved (and could count on).
This preamble, somewhat heavy with symbolism, is followed by an abrupt shift to a focus on Alice, who continues going to the pool because she doesn’t remember it has closed.
Her mental fortitude suffers a rupture, much like the crack in the pool, which makes her early dementia pronounced enough that she requires care her husband cannot provide. Thus, she is taken to the shrewdly named Belavista, a “long-term, for-profit memory residence” where she will live as her condition worsens.Alice’s distant daughter re-emerges in light of her mother’s new condition, and an exploration of the ever-widening crack in their relationship as well as Alice’s decline make up the remainder of the novel.
There is much to admire about Otsuka’s lyrical sparseness as she weaves us through the five chapters of this short, often affecting work. She is as expert as ever, for example, in her use of the second person to calibrate the daughter’s regrets (“And now, now that you’ve finally come home, it’s too late.”). But the novel suffers from a jarring lack of structural cohesion that renders Otsuka’s ultimate project fractured.
In the opening two chapters, even with the deliberate nudges towards Alice’s eventual importance, the focus on the multifarious swimmers and the pool is wasted given how suddenly Otsuka changes narrative direction. Indeed, the collective narrative voice of those two chapters is pointedly dissonant with the second-person voices that continue the novel.
On its own, the opening is almost breathtaking, but in concert with the rest of the book Otsuka creates a tonal disparity that never quite justifies itself.
It may be Otsuka’s point that we, like the swimmers, are all at risk of losing the anchors that keep us afloat without notice. In the chapter “Diem Perdidi” (meaning “I have lost the day”), she chronicles all the things Alice remembers followed by all the things she doesn’t, providing a sobering lesson on this very idea – that none of the fixtures we rely on are guaranteed to stay where they are.
On this point, the novel commands the wisdom and vision of which Otsuka is endlessly capable. But her craftsmanship here lacks the robustness it needs to lift the novel beyond the space of the brilliant provocation into the realm of the marvellous work of art.
