DEPTHS IN THE SHALLOW END

A competitive swimmer’s fading memories of near glory

BOOK REVIEW

Swimming Studies By Leanne Shapton Blue Rider Press 320 pp; $31.50 There is a quiet comfort in not being very good at something. It is a relief to simply surrender to the pleasure of an experience without being hounded by the pesky possibility of greatness. I myself, as anyone who has heard me attempt to carry a tune can tell you, have very little musical talent, and yet I consume music with an appreciation that borders on addiction. There is no anxiety, no crippling self-doubt, no potential disastrous failure in the mediocre.

Having said this, it seems absurd — if not ungrateful — to meditate on the anguish of being “very good.” Being talented but not the best is the kind of thing you get crucified and called selfish for complaining about, but the reality is that the “close but no cigar” characteristic of personal experience is actually a very real burden to bear. Most of us will quietly identify with the suggestion that it is worse to see victory clearly yet never access it — to make the shortlist, to get the job interview, to come in second and walk away empty-handed. Exclusion from the fight at the top is indeed liberating.

With Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton asks the question so many of us are embarrassed to articulate — what is the implication of coming very close to greatness, of very nearly grasping it, yet falling short? In words and accompanying images she touches on the root of human anxiety, this pervasive terror and frustration of “good enough,” of perfection in proximity but never accessed.

Shapton, now better known as an accomplished writer and illustrator, was very close to being the best in an entirely different arena. In competitive swimming, she once ranked eighth nationally, going to the Olympic trials in both 1988 and 1992. “Swimming is my disembodied youth,” she says, providing a linked series of reflections on her lifelong relationship with the sport. From her rigorous training regimen as a young girl, to the adult leisure of backyard pools, to the escape of vacation beaches, the book provides an idea of what it is like to be followed by the devotion to something now gone.

For Shapton, and her 20-year distance on the competitive experience, excelling in youth is “like something I said that impressed someone that I don’t remember saying.” It is lost to the past, an anecdote brought up in awkward conversation, a memory built into her body aching to be unpacked. She is candid about the occasional ugliness of the compulsion; how it effects mental health, relationships, and a dissatisfaction in the self.

The author’s eye for detail with that much distance is amazingly shrewd, meaning those of us who grew up in her era will adhere quickly to her vivid and pervasive pop culture references. Her youth is clad in Beaver Canoe sweatshirts, safety-pinned inseams and the iconic embroidered horses of those coveted polo shirts. The soundtrack is Smells Like Teens Spirit, Shaggy and Phil Collins, the shower rooms smell like Finesse shampoo, and a crush-worthy boy’s U2 War T-shirt is worn and adoringly never washed. Largely an archetypal coming-of-age narrative, it has all the awkwardness of first feelings, of first witnessing the nudity of older women in public showers, of first kisses and first fears of the limitation and sexualization of the body. It examines the physical and mental flagellation inherent in sport, suggesting that true human growth comes from punishment and endurance rather than success.

It takes Shapton too long to get to her epiphany in this book, which is a shame, because when she does it is glorious. The latter third is gaspingly beautiful in its insight, proving her project actually has very little to do with swimming — a welcome reality for those readers whose mediocre athletic experience was benchwarming. As the momentum builds outside of mere recounting, her thoughtfulness reaches deep into the themes like the masochism of sport, the pervasive culture of “specialness” and how a strange fidelity to pain is what “puts you in the water.”

An anecdote about her inability to swim in St. Bart’s because she is “pool-trained” subtly suggests that rigorous structure can limit our ability to relax. In another passage, she artfully compares the terrifying, allconsuming destruction of romantic love to shark attacks. “We all have savage sides and gaping maws, we all are capable of eating and being eaten,” she writes. “First the crush, then being swept away, inflamed, devastated, consumed.” When Shapton divorces herself from acutely conveying the details, and instead analyzes the implications, her prose flourishes.

While the initial premise runs the danger of being dismissed, it is abundantly clear that Swimming Studies an intimate and beautiful meditation on human fallibility and the embarrassing, often unstated anxiety of success. While her approach to memoir can at times be opaque with compressed detail, in weaving tightly together the smallest, familiar memories, we feel deeply the complex yearnings of wanting to be the best and coming up just short.