In Julie Otsuka’s remarkable novel The Swimmers, even the most judicious reader might not notice they’re experiencing a miracle. Dive deep to the bottom of this pool and understand that within a few pages, Otsuksa has created a full world of people who feel most alive in the depths below the city where they’ve spent so many years swimming a regimented amount of laps back and forth. One of them, a woman named Alice who is withering away from dementia, will be featured once we leave the pool. . A crack makes itself visible in the lowest depths of the pool. Officials examine the damage and eventually conclude that the pool needs to be permanently closed.
At its most basic, the opening seventy-six pages of The Swimmers are a conventional, self-contained narrative with a clear beginning, conventional exposition, understandable climax and logical conclusion. Otsuka ruminates on “fast lane people,” “medium lane people,” “slow lane people,” how their lives down in the pool are reflective of how they conduct themselves in the above world. “And even though it is with reluctance that we return to our lives above,” she writes, “we take it all in stride, for we are mere day-trippers here, in the realm of the upper air.” They only feel alive when they’re down in the pool. When the crack comes, some of the swimmers wonder if it is a symptom of geological decay while others wonder if it’s a tear in their world’s fabric “…that no amount of goodwill will fix.”
It isn’t until we enter the next section, starting the final one hundred pages, that we truly see the blossoming of the seeds Otsuka has planted. In part three, “Diem Perdidi,” the narrator is Alice’s daughter, and Otsuka’s motivation is brazenly stylistic. It works, miraculously, to demonstrate the power of memory in the life of a character losing hers. Alice’s daughter takes over, and in her second-person account of her mother’s status, she reminds us 187 times of everything her mother remembers, and 37 times of the things she doesn’t. The repetition could be jarring in other hands, merely a gimmick to test our patience, but Otsuka is too careful here. She’s too respectful of both her characters and readers:
“She remembers your name…She remembers that once you had a husband…She remembers not sleeping for days.”
This incessant inventory of facts serves as a testimony to survival, the ability to cling to some final moments of dignity, of what we once were and might become again if only we can clap our hands three times and wish upon a falling star. Even those of us not personally familiar with this experience (and apparently this is based on Otsuka’s own experiences with her ailing mother) will relate to the aching pain of this section and the determination to claim every last element of what we remember, no matter how trivial, as a major success.
The next section,”Belavista,” takes us down a darker road. It seems to be narrated from the perspective of a nursing home activities director. Belavista is identified as a “…long-term, for-profit memory residence” where Alice has been sent to live. From the first line of this section, we know we’re in trouble. We know this isn’t where we should be: “You are here today because you have failed the test.” A while later, in no uncertain terms, we’re told there “…is no ‘meaning’ or ‘higher purpose’ to your affliction.” Belavista has taken our hope and dignity. “It does not matter who you were ‘before’ in what you call your ‘real life,’ we’re told. All our accomplishments are meaningless because “…the only thing that matters at Belavista is who you are now.” It’s a thoroughly brutal rendering of what we might expect at such a place while we wait out our fates. “Your main activity, of course, will be waiting.”
The biggest threat at “Belavista’ is never far behind. We will eventually forget everything. In the next section, “Euronero,” Alice’s daughter is wracked with guilt, “You never once invited your mother to come visit you in all the years you were away,” she recalls. “You broke her heart. And you wrote.” Alice tells stories about her time in the Japanese internment camps, “The guard towers. The rattlesnakes. The barbed-wire fence.” The way Otsuka makes this horrible memory so incidental reminds us that it was anything but that for the Japanese families then and over the many years that have followed. The passage of time and dementia won’t make that pain go away.
There are no wasted moments in The Swimmers.. Through the help of a renowned neurologist who extracts Alice’s brain from her corpse, the daughter is able to determine that Alice died of frontotemporal dementia. Otsuka balances this matter-of-fact account with a heartbreaking conclusion where she is convinced that her mother, who hadn’t spoken in more than a year, is on the verge of speaking every time their faces meet after visitations are over. The Swimmers is a sweeping, heartbreaking, sublime exercise in the perfect balance of style and substance.
