September 1, 2021
Known to one another only by their preferred lanes (slow, medium, or fast), a group of women who share the pleasure of swimming regularly at the local pool are disrupted when it is closed owing to a bad crack. Alice is particularly affected; she swam to ward off her descent into dementia, and as her health fails precipitously, she's troubled by memories of the Japanese American internment camp where she spent World War II and visited by an estranged daughter who has missed her chance to reconnect. From National Book Award finalist Otsuka.
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Starred review from December 20, 2021
Otsuka (The Buddha in the Attic) delivers a quick and tender story of a group of swimmers who cope with the disruption of their routines in various ways. The regulars at a pool range in age, ability, and swimming habits, and are connected by an incessant need to swim. When a crack shows up in the deep end of lane four, the swimmers all grows nervous about the pool’s future. While the “nonswimmers” in their lives (also known as “crack deniers”) dismiss the swimmers’ concerns, the swimmers collectively discover how the crack “quietly lodges itself, unbeknownst to you, in the recesses of your mind”—except for cheerful Alice, who has swum in the pool for 35 years and now has dementia. Some members stop going to the pool out of fear, while others try to get close to the crack. Just before the pool is closed, Alice determines to get in “Just one more lap.” Otsuka cleverly uses various points of view: the swimmers’ first-person-plural narration effectively draws the reader into their world, while the second person keenly conveys the experiences of Alice’s daughter, who tries to recoup lost time with her mother after Alice loses hold of her memories and moves into a memory care facility. It’s a brilliant and disarming dive into the characters’ inner worlds.
Starred review from February 1, 2022
Distinguished best-selling novelist Otsuka's (Buddha in the Attic) latest is an introspective work that examines life's journeys from a multitude of perspectives. Using second- and third-person narrative, the novel opens with a look at the regular visitors to a local public swimming pool and their day-to-day habits and accomplishments, with brief mention of their names and occupations. The story then shifts from the swimmers to the discovery of a crack in the pool, its effects on the swimmers, and the pool's eventual closure. The final chapters focus on Alice, a retired lab technician with dementia, briefly mentioned in the novel's opening, whose condition has worsened to the point that she now lives in a long-term care residence. Otsuka's spare, dreamlike writing offers readers a deeply touching exploration of the impact on Alice's Japanese American family (particularly her daughter) of caring for a loved one with dementia. VERDICT Otsuka is noteworthy for her skilled storytelling and her ability to immerse readers in her characters' emotional journeys. Essential reading for those already familiar with Otsuka's work; those who haven't read her are likely to be duly impressed.--Shirley Quan
Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from December 15, 2021
Having concentrated on one family in her first novel, then eschewed individual protagonists for a collective "we" in her second, Otsuka now blends the two approaches, shifting from an almost impersonal, wide-lens view of society to an increasingly narrow focus on a specific mother-daughter relationship. The book begins as tart social comedy. A narrative "we" represents various swimmers frequenting an underground community pool. A microcosm of America, they remain mostly anonymous, although a few names are dropped in from time to time as a kind of punctuation. The swimmers are fleshed out as a group by multiple lists detailing a wide range of occupations and social roles, motivations to swim, swimming styles, and eventually reactions to a mysterious crack that appears suddenly on the pool floor. Initially dismissed as inconsequential by the experts, the crack morphs, Covid-like, into more and more cracks until panicky authorities announce the pool will close altogether. What seems a minor act of grace on the final day of operation--the lifeguard generously allows a memory-impaired woman named Alice to swim one extra lap--leaves the reader unprepared for the sharp swerve the novel now makes. Alice takes center stage, her cognitive and eventual physical deterioration viewed from multiple angles. The narrative voice is now addressing itself to "you," Alice's daughter, a Japanese American novelist with an obvious resemblance to the author, observing Alice's decline in slightly removed, writerly detail as Alice's memories drift from random, repetitive, and oddly specific to more random, less frequent, and increasingly vague. Institutional care follows, with the new "we" of the narrative voice addressing Alice in cold bureaucratic lingo that represents the nursing facility in a snarky, predictable, and disappointingly un-nuanced sketch of institutional care. As Alice fades further, the daughter returns. She berates herself for the ways she failed her mother. But dredging up her own memories, she also begins to recognize the love her parents felt for each other and for her. The combination of social satire with an intimate portrait of loss and grief is stylistically ambitious and deeply moving.
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Starred review from December 15, 2021
Award-winning, best-selling Otsuka is averaging one book per decade, making each exquisite title exponentially more precious. Here she creates a stupendous collage of small moments that results in an extraordinary examination of the fragility of quotidian human relationships. Initially set in an underground pool, it voices a collective "we" that reports the comings and goings of the titular swimmers, regulars who uphold all regulations, who have established their schedules, lanes, and paces with comforting familiarity. A crack in the pool's bottom gets noticed, examined, almost forgotten until it causes immutable upheaval. Some never swim again--most notably Alice, for whom the water was an essential haven: "Up there . . . I'm just another little old lady. But down here, at the pool, I'm myself." Alice, "a retired lab technician now in the early stages of dementia," is the first of Otsuka's few characters identified by name. Her story aboveground is a polyphonic reveal through her lingering yet fading memories, the care center that she can never leave, and her estranged daughter, who based her second novel "on the most painful and difficult years of [Alice's] life." Alice survived that ""first frenzy of forgetting" as an imprisoned Japanese American during WWII, and now a final erasure looms. Once more, Otsuka creates an elegiac, devastating masterpiece.
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