Tale of drowning marriage
By Mike Peed |
February 3, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
READERS of the news of the weird may recall a contest sponsored some years ago by the Guinness beer company in which first prize was a pub in Ireland - title and deed, stools, steins and taps. You needed only to compose a clever essay, throw a few darts and demonstrate that you could pull the perfect pint. Those looking for escape – and unable to find it in the bottom of their mugs stateside – had their opening.
Swap Murphy's Irish Stout for Guinness, and you'll find, if not the full premise of Matt Bondurant's haunting third novel, certainly the precipitating event. "The Night Swimmer" introduces us to an idealistic young couple from Vermont who take over the Nightjar, a moldering pub in a lonely corner of County Cork.
Fred and Elly Bulkington fell in love as graduate students in English literature. He harbors vague ambitions of becoming a novelist, while she longs to hone her skills as a deep-water swimmer (think of Lynne Cox and the English Channel). The isolation of this part of Cork, and particularly Roaringwater Bay, would seem to suit them both, but Bondurant suggests more ominous possibilities.
A comparison to John Cheever's most famous story, "The Swimmer," is unavoidable and Cheever's journals supply epigraphs for the books sections, lines like "When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand." In fact, Neddy, Cheever's privileged suburbanite, evinces an "inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools," to which Bondurant's Elly (whose name is clearly an echo) replies: "My natural state seemed to be damp and clammy, my hair stiff with salt or lake scum. It was my only true source of satisfaction, when I felt most complete." Like Cheever's, Bondurant's characters are children masquerading as adults, unable or unwilling to brave life's challenges.
Bondurant's previous novel, "The Wettest County in the World," is a model of tone and rhythm, and here too his prose teems with evocative detail and surprising metaphor, capturing the fervid mania of a couple spinning out of control. With Elly always in the water, Fred becomes hostage to a lifeless pub, ostensibly writing his novel but in reality scribbling bits of unconnected musings, a kind of madman's commonplace book.
Unfortunately, Bondurant isn't satisfied with dissecting Fred and Elly's increasingly troubled marriage. Rather, as his story progresses, it balloons with thuggish turf wars and streaks of magic realism: Cheever by way of Mario Puzo and Jorge Luis Borges. The mashup of genres and an overabundance of half-sketched characters and cryptic plot turns threaten to neuter an otherwise powerful book.
Still, Bondurant's lyricism redeems "The Night Swimmer," especially in several passages describing Fred and Elly's life before Ireland, a holiday gathering with Elly's parents and a duck hunt with Fred's father that throw light on a world the couple is soon desperate to re-enter. "We would start over, start a family," an increasingly despondent Elly tells herself, admitting that "the sudden thought of a child filled me with a glorious kind of relief, like I was released from a net, like I was saved from drowning." It's a callow fantasy. Similar, you might say, to dreaming about what you'd do if you won the top prize in an audacious contest.
Swap Murphy's Irish Stout for Guinness, and you'll find, if not the full premise of Matt Bondurant's haunting third novel, certainly the precipitating event. "The Night Swimmer" introduces us to an idealistic young couple from Vermont who take over the Nightjar, a moldering pub in a lonely corner of County Cork.
Fred and Elly Bulkington fell in love as graduate students in English literature. He harbors vague ambitions of becoming a novelist, while she longs to hone her skills as a deep-water swimmer (think of Lynne Cox and the English Channel). The isolation of this part of Cork, and particularly Roaringwater Bay, would seem to suit them both, but Bondurant suggests more ominous possibilities.
A comparison to John Cheever's most famous story, "The Swimmer," is unavoidable and Cheever's journals supply epigraphs for the books sections, lines like "When the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand." In fact, Neddy, Cheever's privileged suburbanite, evinces an "inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools," to which Bondurant's Elly (whose name is clearly an echo) replies: "My natural state seemed to be damp and clammy, my hair stiff with salt or lake scum. It was my only true source of satisfaction, when I felt most complete." Like Cheever's, Bondurant's characters are children masquerading as adults, unable or unwilling to brave life's challenges.
Bondurant's previous novel, "The Wettest County in the World," is a model of tone and rhythm, and here too his prose teems with evocative detail and surprising metaphor, capturing the fervid mania of a couple spinning out of control. With Elly always in the water, Fred becomes hostage to a lifeless pub, ostensibly writing his novel but in reality scribbling bits of unconnected musings, a kind of madman's commonplace book.
Unfortunately, Bondurant isn't satisfied with dissecting Fred and Elly's increasingly troubled marriage. Rather, as his story progresses, it balloons with thuggish turf wars and streaks of magic realism: Cheever by way of Mario Puzo and Jorge Luis Borges. The mashup of genres and an overabundance of half-sketched characters and cryptic plot turns threaten to neuter an otherwise powerful book.
Still, Bondurant's lyricism redeems "The Night Swimmer," especially in several passages describing Fred and Elly's life before Ireland, a holiday gathering with Elly's parents and a duck hunt with Fred's father that throw light on a world the couple is soon desperate to re-enter. "We would start over, start a family," an increasingly despondent Elly tells herself, admitting that "the sudden thought of a child filled me with a glorious kind of relief, like I was released from a net, like I was saved from drowning." It's a callow fantasy. Similar, you might say, to dreaming about what you'd do if you won the top prize in an audacious contest.
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