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Saturday, September 2, 2017

Review of SWIMMING LESSONS by Claire Fuller

3.5 Stars 
It is 2003, and Gil Coleman, famous writer of a scandalous novel, thinks he sees his wife Ingrid who went missing eleven years earlier.  Trying to follow her, he falls and suffers a number of injuries.  His daughters, Nan and Flora, rush to their former home to care for their aging father. 

Interspersed with this story is a second timeline from 1976 to 1992.  Ingrid, in the month leading up to her disappearance, writes a series of letters to Gil in which she tells the truth about their 16-year marriage:  “I’m sure I’ll write things you claim I imagined, dreamt, made up, but this is how I see it.  This, here, is my truth” (13).  She hides the letters in the many books collected by Gil. 

One of the mysteries of the book is whether Ingrid is alive.  She was presumed to have drowned but her body was never found.  Flora refuses to believe that her mother is dead, though Nan, the elder daughter, scoffs at the idea that Ingrid is alive.  It is this mystery that creates interest throughout.  In the end, the reader has to decide for him/herself what to believe, and the epilogue which ends on a very indefinite note will not please readers who yearn for more closure. 

Fuller clearly feels as Gil does.  He tells his writing students:  “’Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line. . . . A book becomes a living thing only when it interacts with a reader.  What do you think happens in the gaps, the unsaid things, everything you don’t write?  The reader fills them from their own imagination.  But does each reader fill them how you want, or in the same way?  Of course not. . . . all books are created by the reader’” (26).  The use of the “open verdict” (287) at the end is another way that Fuller lets the reader decide what happened. 

The events of 2003 are narrated in third person, using Flora’s point of view.  Flora is not a likeable character.  She is 22 years of age but she is very self-centred and immature.  Though she clings to things her mother owned (a suitcase, a dress, and even a swimming towel), she worships her father though it becomes obvious from Ingrid’s letters that Gil is not the man Flora imagines.  She seems to resent her sister because Nan took on the role of mother after Ingrid disappeared.  She is naïve and unaware. 

Flora was always closer to her father perhaps because the two are so much alike.  Nan even says, “’Like father, like daughter’” (247).  Gil has a public persona (a handsome man who mesmerizes people with his charm and wit), but as a husband and father, Ingrid shows him to be largely absent.  In her letters, he emerges as a narcissist unconcerned with the needs of his wife and family; the title of the novel that gains him fame and notoriety describes him perfectly. 

The book asks whether it is better to be a realist or a dreamer.  Flora argues that “’Not knowing is so much better’” whereas Nan has the opposite view:  “’I’d rather know the truth . . . I’d like to know what really happened’” (113).  As a young man, Gil argues that imagination can give people hope (167) but later seems to change his mind:  “’I’m beginning to think it’s better to know, one way or the other.  It’s taken me a long time to realize, but I don’t think it’s good to have an imagination which is more vivid, wilder, than real life’” (113). 

There are weaknesses in the book.  Characters do not always believe plausibly.  Gil’s appeal to Ingrid doesn’t make sense; he’s a man twice her age and he treats her abysmally from the beginning, both ignoring her and expecting her to pay his library fines.  She is supposedly an intelligent woman, yet she is so easily manipulated, even after warnings from both her and Gil’s best friends?  By the late 1970s, birth control was not uncommon so why she didn’t use it?  The ending has Jonathan and Louise behaving implausibly:  given the circumstances, their going to the pub for a sandwich does not make sense.

As I’ve already implied, this is a book in which much is not said.  This style is appropriate for a novel in which characters to do communicate well.  Ingrid writes to say “all the things I haven’t been able to say in person” (13) and Flora complains, “’Nobody told me anything . . . I had to work it out by listening at doors, overhearing snatches of conversation and filling in the gaps’” (247).  Like Flora whose “questions again went unanswered” (287), the reader will wonder about many things. 

People not liking ambiguity would probably find themselves frustrated with this novel.  Others might enjoy reading something that almost becomes a “choose your own adventure” book.  Symbolism abounds, beginning with the rain of fish (22); these await the reader to interpret.  I enjoy interpreting works of literature but I must admit to sometimes getting frustrated at what seemed to be the author’s unwillingness to be a factualist.  For those who prefer to use their own imaginations, here’s a warning from Ingrid:  “reality is so much more conventional than imagination” (275). 

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