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Avg. Rating: 4.34
Very Dramatic Story of a Family
This was a book I just couldn't put down. It is the story of one family. The parents [60's hippy types] are not a major player in the novel but provide an important insight into the background of Aaron, Jack and Lila and how they were raised. When the boys were just teenagers and their sister only 9 years old a terrible tragedy happened to the family that threw them all into a tailspin. Lila, ten years later goes in search for her one missing brother and tries to piece together what happened. She witnessed in part the happening, but was so young and it has definitely distorted her life and how she lives it. She is in some ways mentally effected by the whole thing and has a very strange behavior pattern that at times was disturbing to read. I'm glad I did cintinue reading though because it was worth it. This author deals with a very terrible tragedy with such depth and drama. I highly recommend this book.
Impressive First Time Out
"Swimming" is without a doubt an impressive debut from a talented writer. It is not an entirely successful debut, but it interesting even in its flaws, and that is more than I can say for most novels I read. The tale is kind of an emotional whodunit, or perhaps a whydonit. The first part of the story takes place in 1987 when college student Aaron Silver brings his girlfriend Sunanne to meet his family in rural New Hampshire. The family is a bit odd, and there are unexplained and perhaps inexplicable tensions between Aaron and his wild brother, Jack, and soon sparks begin to fly between Jack and Suzanne. Much emotional mayhem ensues until the visit climaxes in a tragedy that the book cover describes but I will not, since I wished I hadn't known it when I was reading. The novel then picks up ten years later, focusing on Lila, the younger sister, who is obsessed with the events of that night and begins stalking Suzanne in an effort to learn the truth about her brothers.Hershon's writing is at its most successful when she is conveying the very real emotional confusion people feel at what seem like key moments in their life. "Swimming" seems to me especially effective at demonstrating the intense importance of these private feelings and the sometimes horrific consequences of privileging irrational passion over logical responsibility. In the heat of the moment, the author wants to argue, the selfish and thoughtless decisions we make, radiate outward into our lives and the lives of others. The book is also wonderful when it examines the confluence of memory and sadness, demonstrating how we process our own bad decisions, what we chose to remember, forget and to fabricate. On the other hand, "Swimming," splashes around in the pond a bit too loudly and clumsily at times. The opening prologue is both unnecessary and so badly written I cannot even believe the same person composed those few pages and the book that follows. In the main body of "Swimming," the writing is never bad or clunky, but it is sometimes burdened by too much attention to craft. The flap copy tells us that Hershon received her MFA from Columbia University, and this book reads to me like MFA fiction. Obviously some people like that sort of thing, but I find her endless and belabored details of clothes, rooms, smells, plants, and anything else on which she happens to draw a bead ultimately kind of tedious and rarely in service of the story she wants to tell. If anything, the resonance of her tale and her characters gets lots sometimes in her descriptions. This book could have been a bit slimmer, and if Hershon had reserved her truly impressive talents for elements of the story with emotional consequences, it would have been a sleeker and far more poignant volume. As it is, it reveals an unquestionably talented author whose next work I would most certainly seek out.
This One Sinks Like a Rock!
Yikes--where do I begin? There was not one well-developed character in this entire book! The plot begins promising enough, but the characters are so blah and undefined that I ended up not caring at all about what happened to them. Ms. Hershon spends page after page on mind-numbingly dull details that add absolutely nothing to the plot or characters. I saved this book to read on my vacation and was very disappointed. Read The Lake of Dead Languages instead--it is a thousand times better!
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