The Swimmers: A Novel
By Julie Otsuka
Knopf, 2022

There are two main problems with Julie Otsuka’s new book, The Swimmers: A Novel – apart from its absurd cover-blurb, that is. Colson Whitehead sighs, “Here comes the new Julie Otsuka novel, so we can begin to live again.” It’s difficult to know why mainstream publishers think this ridiculous kind of bullcrap is anything but embarrassing, but at least it’s easily ignored.

No, the first real problem is that The Swimmers: A Novel is not a novel. The first section of the book, which is called “The Underground Pool” but might just as well be called “The Swimmers,” is about a group of people whose lives intersect only when they’re all using a communal basement swimming pool. The section is 75 pages long – a novella, not a novel. So calling the book “a novel” is a lie, of a type that’s become depressingly common in the age of so-called autofiction.

The second problem is that, a few entirely unconvincing little wisps of reconciliation on the author’s part notwithstanding, there’s nothing connecting “The Underground Pool” with the book’s other stories, “Belavista,” and “Euroneuro,” although those two stories are connected to each other closely enough to constitute a single second novella on their own. So The Swimmers: A Novel is actually a pair of novellas lumped together under a bit of false advertising.

And those two problems maybe open the door to two further problems, the first of which is that, a few entirely unconvincing little wisps of invention on the author’s part notwithstanding, these novellas are indeed the aforementioned autoficiton, and they read that way. At every turn, they wallow in the quotidian plodding of a much-too-long New York Times Magazine profile piece, as when a character in “Belavista” is contemplating all the possibly-preferable alternatives to declining into dementia:

Cancer would be better, you may be thinking. Or heart disease. Or a bullet straight through to the brain. Or maybe you are simply filled with regret for all the things you did not do. You should have done more crossword puzzles, taken more risks, signed up for that Great Books class, used up all your vacation days, removed the plastic slipovers from the “good” furniture (“I’m turning into my mother!” you once said, accurately), worn those expensive heels in the back of your closet you were saving for that special occasion (which would be what?). You should have lived (but what did you do instead? You played it safe and stayed in your lane). Or maybe you should have chosen the Mediterranean Diet over the Atkins. 

The topical references, the oh-girlfriend parentheticals, the general it’s-never-going-to-endedness of the burble … it all has the no-stakes no-revision feel of a Harper’s piece by some celebrity who can’t be properly edited, which is of course the next problem. There are some moving passages in a couple of the stories here about the undemonstrative creeping ravages of dementia, passages that will certainly resonate with readers who’ve gone through such things with a loved one. But since these passages are written in the completely flat affect of all autofiction, they’re unlikely to resonate with anybody who hasn’t gone through such things. There’s none of the reach or sweep of fiction in these pages, mainly because there’s precious little fiction in these pages. 

“The Underground Pool” might have made a novel, if it had been expanded and if its characters had been invested with any depth or nuance or complexity. Certainly it works as a premise far better than the book’s other novella, which is a collection of lightly-fictionalized excerpts from the author’s journal: a varied collection of people brought together in semi-anonymity by their visits to this secluded swimming pool, and the weird group-psychology affects they experience when the pool’s closing is announced:

We are kinder now, more yielding. In a word, less uptight. The new niceness, we call it. Boundaries loosen up. Intralane rivalries dissolve. Grudges are forgiven. So what if she once unplugged my hair dryer in the locker room? Pretenses fall away. Formerly reckless passers once intent on getting ahead at all costs now proceed with the requisite tap on the foot just like everyone else … Ankle yankers desist. Tailgaters cease to tail. Lane bullies rein it in. Fast- and slow-lane swimmers who never had much to say to one another now exchange pleasantries, postswim, as they are toweling off on the deck.

If we can overlook the mistakes (“less uptight” is not one word) and, again, the endless-feeling wheezing of it all, moments like these are effective. Given revision and significantly more concentration on the author’s part, such a premise could be worked into a novel. But that’s hardly going to happen if we’ve got Colson Whitehead hyperventilating about how a lumpy, ill-sorted collection of author-jottings allows us all to live again, for Pete’s sake.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.