“Your mother, you realize, is holding you.”
In the wardrobe of literature, short stories are socks: their relative smallness invites daring. An otherwise gray-clad businessman can experiment with blue and orange checks; Donald Barthelme can interrupt his narrative (such as it is) to write the word “butter” eighty-six times in a row. The risk, confined to a few square feet of fabric or a few pages in a book, is minimal.
Novels, on the other hand, are pants. They have society-facing, structural work to do (you can get arrested if your pants fail in one of their more basic functions). Skin-tight fluorescent jeans, a whole book narrated by a tree — these are choices you might regret by lunchtime (or by chapter two). Most “masters” of experimental fiction — Joy Williams, Barry Hannah, Ben Marcus — focus, wisely, on the sock drawer.
Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers is that rare garment: a bold pair of pants (pool-hued, oddly patched) that you won’t regret for an instant. It’s deeply weird. The first half is narrated in the first-person-plural (“… we are overeaters, underachievers, dog walkers…”); the second half is addressed to a you who often bears a strong resemblance to Julie Otsuka. It begins as a meditation on the joys of lap-swimming (the best literary treatment of swimming I’ve ever read, incidentally), morphs into a surreal semi-fable (a portentous crack develops at the bottom of the pool), and then flip-turns to become a devastating and mostly naturalistic portrait of a woman dying of dementia. It’s as formless as water.
But what it isn’t — unlike most experimental novels — is a slog. I read it in a day or two, never confused and never irritated. Usually when I read experimental novels, even good ones, I’m wearing the inner version of a strained smile; I admire the inventiveness, and I want it to stop. Reading Otsuka, though, I felt the deep, delicious, calm of her lap-swimmers:
“Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind. Failed painters become elegant breaststrokers. Untenured professors slice, shark-like, through the water, with breathtaking speed. The newly divorced HR Manager grabs a faded red Styrofoam board and kicks with impunity.”
Which isn’t to say that The Swimmers is all bliss and buoyancy. The second half is painful, even brutal. And that pain turns out to be the novel’s secret source, its artistic magnet. Her novel doesn’t have the unity of Artistotelean drama; it has the unity of dreams.
And what this dream is about — the nub of dark matter from which the whole novel emanates — is the decline and death of Otsuka’s mother from fronto-temporal dementia. That agonizing experience, like the chirping alarm that the dreaming mind turns first into a flock of birds and then into a jazz concert, furnishes the whole series of audacious transformations that is the book. The coherence only becomes clear in retrospect.
Act I — life in the womb (what a glorious pool this is!)
Act II — the unfathomable disruption that is birth (what is this crack? are we gonna get kicked out of our beloved pool??)
Act III — the world in all its startling harshness (wait, our mothers can get sick? They can forget us??)
No script doctor would approve this structure for a story about a mother and daughter; no reader could fail to be moved by it. By the time our conscious minds realize what the book is actually about, our unconscious minds have already been trembling, for a good hundred pages, on the precipice of an incomprehensible loss.
And so Otsuka, to tip us into outright devastation, needs barely to push.
Late in the book, by which point the pool is a distant memory (or rather non-memory) Otsuka visits her mother at the assisted living facility.
“You have not heard the sound of her voice, now, in almost two years. Suddenly, she reaches out and grasps your arm. Her grip is strong but gentle. Her hand is unexpectedly warm. Your mother, you realize, is holding you.”
This is something like the book’s climax, and yet the prose’s burners remain resolutely low. Otsuka has felt horribly guilty throughout her mother’s decline (she should have called more often, she should have taken her on trips) and the tone here contains an element of penance, of longing for forgiveness.
And her mother grants it.
Your mother, you realize, is holding you. What a beautiful surprise this sentence is! Their entire six-decade relationship — the mother holding Julie as an infant; the years of distancing and struggle; the loving, heartbroken end — collapses into a single gesture. This moment could have justified an aria; it could have launched pages of lyrical memory and musing. Otsuka gives it a single italicized word.
And this is how you create an experimental garment that the reader will truly cherish. You pair your innovative zeal with scrupulous craftsmanship. You temper the wildness of your conceit with the sobriety of your execution. You make sure that there’s a kernel of real and potent feeling at the center of your design, and you never let it out of your sight.
Beautiful review of a book I likely would not have read but will now. Your last line says it all: ...the kernel of real and potent feeling..." Without that, novels lose me, even those that are more conventional in form. And I love the wardrobe/fabric metaphor. As usual, a rich, thought-provoking piece with kernels of real feeling.
Will read the book. Loved the article!
Loved the analogy. Brilliant!