I didn’t mean to do it, but somehow, this summer, I picked up not one but two books with alarmingly similar premises. Both were lyrical and written by women. Both were about middle-class English families on holiday. Both had precocious teenage daughters. Both evoked philandering husbands. Both involved the arrival of a mysterious woman who upends everything.
It is there, however, that the similarities between Ali Smith’s The Accidental and Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home end.
The latter is the story that leaves many ends untied: the Holocaust that marked the protagonist’s family history, the motives of his wife, the purported sanity (or lack thereof) of the mysterious woman who arrives to wreck havoc on their vacation. Myriad accessory characters dip into the story without rhyme or reason, and the conclusion feels somehow at once both unearned and unfinished.
I can see how the above would make it seem I didn’t enjoy this novel at all. I did – I liked its conciseness, at just over 150 pages. I liked its poetic repetition. I liked, even, what seemed to be a unique approach to a philanderer – something that I didn’t think was possible in the 21st century. Maybe it’s only because of how much I loved Smith’s Accidental that this book left me nonplussed. Maybe it’s a case of eating a delicious orange right after eating a delicious piece of cake and tasting just acid. Maybe it deserves another chance.