Swimming Home: A Novel
This short but extraordinary novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012, takes place in the south of France, where two English couples and one’s teenage daughter are sharing a vacation home. One day a woman, Kitty Finch, emerges naked from the swimming pool and becomes the force field shaping the couples’ actions and those of the few secondary characters for the succeeding week. Kitty is, in the words of Levy’s spare and haunting prose, “a window that was waiting to be climbed through.” The tension between the two families—poet Joe (Jozef) Jacobs, his war correspondent wife, Isabel, and their daughter, Nina; and Mitchell and his wife, Laura—is palpable, and Levy’s surgically precise language insightfully reveals their characters with the intensity of a tightly controlled play. Levy’s changes of pace and tone, from poetic to vulgar, drive this very arresting novel—at times suggestive of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf—to its unsettling conclusion. --Mark Levine