Swimming, by Nicola Keegan

No doubt attracted by Swimming's brilliant blue cover (the brilliant blue of a swimming pool, of course), my two-year-old granddaughter, eager to get to the children's section, pulled the book off the new fiction shelf, saying "Here, Grandma. read this one." Had she not "recommended" it, I would have missed a very interesting read.

Philomena narrates the book, beginning when she was a plump and "problematic" nine-month-old who had never slept more than "one hour and forty-three minutes." Desperate, her parents have taken her to the swimming pool, where she stuns everyone by not only swimming but doing a flip turn. Mena (or Phil or Boo or Pip, a hated nickname given her as a teenager by a jealous fellow swimmer) has found the place where she belongs. As her swimming skills improve, the body that makes her a freak in her Kansas Catholic school--she 6'2" and has huge feet--also makes her a champion. Swimming takes her to to Stanford University and to three Olympics--the tainted Los Angeles Olympics where the Soviet bloc nations do not compete, the Seoul Olympics at which the testerone-enhanced East Germans kick the Americans' butts, and Barcelona where she triumphs.

But the book is not really about swimming--it's about surviving heartbreak, growing up, moving on. When they are teenagers, Mena's older sister dies of Hodgkin's lymphoma, and her father is killed in a plane crash. Mena's mother stops leaving the house, one younger sister becomes an addict, and the other prays...a lot. Mena escapes through swimming, but she also suffers. When she finally retires from swimming, her struggles reveal just how little peace she has made with her past and herself.

Lest this sound horribly depressing (and it IS sad), Keegan provides plenty of humor. The Mena whose head we live in throughout the book has a sharp wit. For example, in the mourning period after her father's death, she divides the waves of visitors to their home as Encouraging Catholics, Suffering Catholics, and Dark Catholics. The interactions among swimmers--male and female--are described with equal humor (although, when we see Mena through others' eyes, as Keegan occasionally allows us to do, we realize how different the exterior and interior Menas are).

Keegan does not use quotation marks, instead putting dialogue in italics; the fact that some of the material in italics happens only in Mena's head can be confusing, but I got used to it as the book progressed. One of the stylistic things I noticed was Keegan's way with a list. She describes pain in a set of two lists ("The pain comes in shock waves, rogue waves, freak waves, killer waves, surging, spilling, rolling, plunging"). She describes Mena's break-up with her first real love through a list of the items that gradually disappear from her apartment, until the lover's key appears on the counter. It's a somewhat unusual technique that she uses frequently, and it works.

Favorite passage:
Life is a series of complicated errors. Life is all about gliding through angles with curves. And I have real proof, once again, that my mind cannot prepare my body for anything outside a pool, so I close my eyes and swim into sex in a ghostlike glide, knowing that with time this will be funny . . .