SIRI’S SEMANTIC FANTASY

Fuller’s Swimming Lessons is a master-class in prose

Swimming Lessons

By Claire Fuller House of Anansi 295 pp, $19.95

Most people don’t speak in full sentences. Our day-today dialect is a grammatical grab bag: commas (often splicing); semi-colons (I think?); exclamations (if you’re lucky); an assortment of dizzy semantic bits that make conversation the more or less two-way stream of consciousness it is. Just ask any journalist who’s been tasked with transcribing Boris Johnson’s latest presser – and let’s have a chat with his hairdresser while you’re at it.

I don’t think, at least in this regard, that Claire Fuller is like most people. Fuller’s words are so exact and efficient in their storytelling that I imagine the British author to be something like Siri’s semantic fantasy: taut on- tempo accuracy, each word in its place and with due meaning; ruthless, if saying so doesn’t imply it’s anything less than stunningly beautiful. That’s not to suggest that Fuller’s a sixword story kind of gal, nor is it to suggest that her second novel, Swimming Lessons, isn’t overflowing with its own entirely unique brand of poised verbosity. Adjectives are mismatched – colours used to describe smells and touch given its own taste – but they fit, remarkably, without the kind of haphazard sensory hangover you might expect from their author’s fast-and-loose form.

Swimming Lessons opens with a start, delivering its core mystery in three lines flat: Ingrid, Gil’s maybedead-but- at- least- missing wife, turns up quietly around the corner from the bookstore her author- husband occupies in their small seaside English town. Or he thinks so, at least, and if that initial spectral sighting speaks to some mental weariness on Gil’s part, it’ ll take rank with a few others as the couple’s relationship is revealed in retrospect over the book’s course, Gil’s health declining alongside. A twist on tandem narration, Swimming Lessons is told two ways: in real- time, 12 years after Ingrid’s disappearance, when Gil’s daughters Flora and Nanette come home to care for their father; and via Ingrid’s long- ago letters to her flighty husband, tucked in the pages of his books 12 years before she goes missing, each similarly interspersed into the running narration of present-day.

Gil is every bit the eccentric author, packing a Fitzgerald- ian fondness for women and liquor, prone to monologue on the literary condition. Ingrid – first his student, then lover, then the oopsie-daisy mother of his child – has enough rosecoloured romance in her to bide Gil’s charming quirks at first, but happy women don’t tend to up and ostensibly leave their families one afternoon, do they?

The mystery Fuller sets sounds misleadingly straightforward: where’d mom go and maybe do you think dad might be losing it? But in this award- winning author’s hands, and told deftly through a small and wellformed cast, the plot finds depth in its examination of marriage, happiness, and what each means with or without the other. Following an author-within- a- storywithin-a- letter, Swimming Lessons is a book begging for the kind of grating pseudoliterary pretension that’d risk tossing it to cliché. But Fuller’s restraint swells over her sentences and into the story, never wading too deep into a writer’s romantic notions of pretty books, published easily, written under heavy influence of some trademark cocktail their author can’t put down.

Ingrid’s letters are tucked into Gil’s books, printed in full text and captioned with their respective title, author and literal literary location. Three letters in I got a little nervous. Five or so, I began to sweat. Only one of these titles was familiar to me – a guilt-ridden writer lacking formal education in English lit – but when I Googled I found that Fuller wasn’t playing to that crowd anyway: the books Ingrid chooses are practical shoutouts to the letters they’re crammed with. Cheese is cheese and money is money, mostly; her letters on each are largely housed topically, Dewey-style. Or, now at risk of having publicly missed the point entirely, I really hope so.

The elegance Fuller musters in such deliberate language is a feat. But the story itself is pretty genius all on its own: family saga set in a reality- ridden but fictitious world, the characters within carrying enough frightening commentary on life and love to lend the thing some heft, and an understated mystery managed at stable clip throughout. Spots of wayward verbosity stand out only because they’re few, Fuller masterfully accessing every bit of this book to deliver its plot. Objects aren’t quite personified, but even motionless they bear meaning – a pile of papers tumbles in time with Flora’s latest thought, cartwheeling her into Ingrid’s past then to the floor with a flutter – one moment told in ten words maximized by Fuller’s clever writing.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Claire Fuller is a whole lot like the rest of us, gabbing willfully and without worry for pause or precision, having an adjectival field day, straining screen- sore eyes to tell what’s en, what’s em, what’s hyphen and why it matters. Maybe Siri hates her, too. But if Claire Fuller is indeed like the lot of us, wind-bagged humanity hasn’t kept her from crafting a novel that stands out in its pool: Fuller’s Swimming Lessons, it turns out, are themselves a master-class in writing.

THE ELEGANCE FULLER MUSTERS IN SUCH DELIBERATE LANGUAGE IS A FEAT