Salman Rushdie recently mentioned at a reading in Houston, apropos of his novel Luka and the Fire of Life, being attracted to “fiction that waves its arms about.” While Matt Bondurant’s newest offering features no adventuring boys getting blasted to bits and being reconstituted to the accompaniment of videogame-like sucking sounds, according to Rushdie’s sentiment The Night Swimmer definitely flails.
The novel’s young protagonists, narrator Elly Bulkington and her husband Fred, relocate from Vermont to rural southern Ireland upon winning a pub—“title and deed”—in a competition. Structurally, the novel segments into three parts, each named for one of the three tasks Fred completed to win the pub: hitting a bull’s-eye with a dart, pouring a pint of Murphy’s finished with a design in the foam, and reciting a poem. Each section begins with a string of quotes from John Cheever, a writer whose work Elly fell head over heels for in college. And the device works well. Cheever seems to give Elly a voice through which to articulate the inexplicably bizarre, often captivating, but simultaneously cruel thing it is to be alive in a world as beautiful and broken as the one she finds herself in.
The story proper opens with a prologue, weaving scenes of Fred’s barside feats in and out of scenes depicting the young couple’s life before moving to Ireland. Bookending this prologue are some of Elly’s reflections that, taken together, give a portentous glimpse into the pair’s fate after the big move. On page one, Elly confesses, “It is Fred who should be telling you this story … Not me.” Then: “It was a good life. We should have considered what it was we were giving up when we moved to Ireland.” The last thing we hear—before Elly and Fred are plopped into Cork to start their new venture—is the high-water mark of Elly’s reflective commentary: “I think of what happened on that windy shore, the broken harbor, a small pub on the edge of the world, and I am ashamed.”
The fact that it is Elly, not Fred, telling the story has multiple significances, one of which is plot-related (to be found near the end of the book), the other of which has to do with Fred’s particular development as a character. Threading through all the trials and errors of the Bulkingtons’ foray into pub ownership are various marital struggles: fights about having kids, sexual disappointments, individual demons, failures to accomplish long-entertained dreams. Fred is continually undertaking new projects, always changing his mind midcourse, never quite finishing anything: novel writing, pubkeeping, sailing, even smelting. And Elly is constantly on the search for something—perhaps a companion who has the same kind of need for her as she has for him/her/it—often on multiple-hour swims where she clearly becomes most awake, most alive.
Like his characters, Bondurant’s prose itself is alive, immediate, often simple and declarative but given to occasional bursts of lyricism. He handles both the rough, wild terrain of coastal County Cork and its attendant vernacular with a kind of seamless, hard-edged grace. As arresting as Bondurant’s depiction of place is a sense of subtle magic pervading everything (the land, the people, the events). Some of the locals want to deny or ignore any such thing, others seem to warn about it, and still others try to take advantage of it (with ultimately devastating consequences). But the uncanny nature of their new atmosphere somehow fits Elly and Fred. Both already exist somewhere outside the norm of human experience. Elly’s ability to swim as much, and as far, as she does—along with her insatiable desire to be in the water—feels like a kind of magic in itself; and Fred’s haunted obsession with a personal 9/11 memory occupies him to the point of having almost a determinist kind of power over his character arc. A general sense of otherworldly danger hangs over the entire narrative, seasoning it, heightening it, becoming an ever-present tension crackling in the background. You never feel entirely safe reading this book, always on your toes, waiting for whatever might blow through the pub door next. The political, societal, and physical ground all seem to shift as temperamentally as the waves surrounding the tiny nearby island—Cape Clear—that Elly feels drawn to.
Indeed the more personal danger brewing around this island’s eccentric host of characters, involving a centuries-old feud between the dominant Corrigan clan and everyone else (especially newcomers), often echoes the physical danger of the place itself, its fickle waters, its crumbly and sometimes confusing terrain. More than once Elly tries to go out for a long, open-water swim and finds herself foiled by a sudden, treacherous turn in the weather. It’s more than tempting—in fact, it seems we’re almost encouraged—to imbue the setting with a kind of personality. That said, readers are left entirely free to imagine that the volatile, natural weather patterns, the tricks of light, old stories, and multigenerational power struggles with roots in ancient superstitions have developed a kind of unshakable belief in the locals—a belief that artificially imposes intentionality on an insentient earth. It’s a fair way to read the novel and a stance that does nothing to diminish the poignancy of the human struggles Bondurant depicts.
For a relatively thin novel, The Night Swimmer is loaded down with mysteries, some of them spanning not just generations but millennia. Considering the momentousness (and narrative relevance) of these preternatural histories, the reader might find himself wanting more pages, more time, to be absorbed in them. I don’t know whether this is a testament to Bondurant’s dexterity or that such material really might have benefitted from longer treatment. One of the pleasures of reading any novel seems to come from the form’s unique ability to lose the reader inside it for an extended period of time. It becomes a place you can visit, even move to, and it’s peopled with characters who become more and more real partly because of the amount of time you spend with them. I’m reminded of C. S. Lewis commenting to an interviewer once, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me,” as he sat with a copy of Bleak House. But this, clearly, is not a universally shared preference.
Regardless, whether you’re the type who wants a rapidly unfolding mystery set in a sharply rendered and vibrant but treacherous landscape or you’re the type who wants to linger over an ever-deepening, ever-complexifying puzzle, you’ll likely enjoy Bondurant’sThe Night Swimmer. It’s not the kind of book that will puzzle you into apoplexy; it fully realizes itself and gives readers plenty of hooks to hang their hats on by the end; but it will leave you with questions. And these questions are the best kind. As E. M. Forster insisted, one effect distinct to the genius of the novel form is that of “Expansion … Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out.”