Swimming Lessons

I got an advanced reading copy of Claire Fuller's Swimming Lessons, which is due out at the beginning of February.  I thought it was really cool to get an advanced reading copy, and really wanted to make a point of reading it prior to its release date.

Since I'm writing this almost a month before the book is released, I'm going to hide my plot synopsis with a spoiler button because I am going to go into quite a bit of detail:

Swimming Lessons is a story within a story. In the present day, Flora has returned to the house she grew up in after her father, Gil, had an accident. He thought he saw Flora's mother, Ingrid, out on the street; Ingrid has been missing and presumed dead for twelve years. Gil fell and badly hurt himself while trying to follow her. Flora is joined by her older sister Nan, and Richard, the man she is sleeping with. Although she tries to deny it, Flora must face the fact that her father is dying of pancreatic cancer. But being back in her childhood home, Flora starts to question what exactly happened to her mother.

The second story is in my mind the much more interesting of the two. Before disappearing, Ingrid wrote letters to her husband. Gil collects books that have notes in the margins or other paraphernalia left inside from their previous owners. So instead of sending him the letters, Ingrid leaves them in his books. Her letters tell the story of her marriage as she sees it. She starts at the beginning from when she met Gil, who was her professor in university. She continues chronologically, detailing how she disappointed her best friend, Louise, by not only going out with Gil but by marrying him, throwing away their dreams of travelling the world and being beholden to no one. She meets Jonathan, Gil's best friend, and grows to have a close relationship with him over the years. She has her first daughter, Nan, and is wholly unprepared for being (and in some ways unfit to be) a mother. She has miscarriages, including one near the end of term with her son. And even though Jonathan warned her, Ingrid must live through Gil's many infidelities, all the while pinching pennies so her family can survive. She toys with the idea of leaving him, but it only becomes a serious thought when she discovers that Gil had an illegitimate son (who is about 9 months older than her oldest daughter, Nan) AND that he dedicated his masterpiece (a book that she had actually come up with the entire idea for) to her best friend whom Ingrid thought had hated Gil. She ends her letters by detailing the one night stand she has with Jonathan (which Gil had earlier forbidden her to do - his fictional masterpiece was created while Ingrid was fantasizing about what they would do sexually with Jonathan. Gil had forbidden her to have the affair at that time. He also didn't even bother to change Jonathan's name in the book, causing a rift with his best friend) before disappearing on the nude beach. There is a very brief epilogue that implies that contrary to what the two main stories imply, perhaps Ingrid is actually alive and well. I will admit, I thought that was a bit weird. I agree with a Goodreads review I read (and now can't find to link to) that the epilogue really didn't need to be there.

So that's Swimming Lessons.

This was the first book I've ever read by Claire Fuller, and I have to say, I found it very, very hard to put down. I found Ingrid's letters fascinating and I was almost always sad that I had to get through a chapter of Flora before getting back to the letters.  I say almost always, because near the end I started to see parallels between the two stories, which started to make me more interested in Flora's story; I was looking to see what connections I could make between the two texts.

It's stupidly late, so I'm not going to write anything more about this at the moment.  As I said, I really, really liked this book and had a hard time putting it down every night. Fuller had beautiful prose, and Ingrid was so very alive despite not being physically there in the book.  I know that some people (like my mom) may not like the subject matter (because it deals with adultery), but if that doesn't bother you (or can get past that), this is a very interesting book that I think is well worth the read.