The swimming pool /
by LeCraw, Holly.
| Item type | Location | Collection | Call Number | Status | Date Due |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Circulating | Athens | Adult Fiction | AF LeCraw (Browse Shelf) | Available |
From Product Description:
Seven summers ago, Marcella Atkinson fell in love with Cecil McClatchey, a married father of two. But on the same night their romance abruptly ended, Cecil's wife was found murdered—and their lives changed forever. The case was never solved, and Cecil died soon after, an uncharged suspect.
Now divorced and estranged from her only daughter, Marcella lives alone, mired in grief and guilt. Meanwhile, Cecil's grown son, Jed, returns to the Cape with his sister for the first time in years. One day he finds a woman's bathing suit buried in a closet—a relic, unbeknownst to him, of his father's affair—and, on a hunch, confronts Marcella. When they fall into an affair of their own, their passion temporarily masks the pain of the past, but also leads to crises and revelations they never could have imagined.
In what is sure to be the debut of the season, The Swimming Pool delivers a sensuous narrative of such force and depth that you won't be able to put it down.
From Amazon.com Review:
I’m a Southerner born and bred, and I grew up going to the beach for a couple of weeks every year in South Carolina, where the water is as warm as your bath, the pace is slow, and the fake-bamboo furniture is comfortable. Then, after a move to Boston that still baffles even me, I met my husband, who summered. (In all fairness, his family would be loath to use that word; nevertheless, when you decamp to the coast for the entire summer, every summer, that’s summering.) Moreover, they summered on Cape Cod, in a very old house built to withstand howling winter winds (small windows, fireplaces, and low ceilings), and where the decor was not, um, tropical. The water was often freezing. The air was often freezing. In August.
As I’ve begun talking to people about my debut novel, The Swimming Pool, I’ve noticed that one of the most popular questions people ask is “Where did you get the idea for your book?” and that, often, what they are really asking is, “Is it autobiographical?” It’s hard to believe that writers make up stories out of thin air, and for good reason: they don’t. Somewhere, in every book, there are elements hidden of the writer, of the writer’s family, the writer’s history and experience. The best description I have heard is “refracted autobiography”--emphasis on refracted. For instance, The Swimming Pool is the story of a young man, Jed McClatchey, who is mired in grief for his parents, who died seven years previously--his mother in a still-unsolved break-in/murder. Jed falls in love and begins an affair with an older woman, Marcella Atkinson, who he then learns was his late father’s mistress; as one might imagine, complications and revelations ensue.
Now. I am happily married. My parents are both alive. I don’t know anyone who was murdered. I am not Italian (Marcella is). I don’t know any cougars personally. It is all made up.
Except for the fact that this book is set on Cape Cod, and Marcella, an expatriate from a warm and sunny clime, is mystified by it. And except that Jed, who just happens to be a Southerner, has grown up summering there. Which is not usual for a boy from Atlanta. One might say that I have split myself between my two protagonists: I have the woman who feels like a constant outsider; I have the man who loves being somewhere different, who knows how different it is from his birthplace and yet who gets it. Because I think I finally get the Cape, after twenty-something years. Or maybe I just get it enough to fake it. I can still stand a bit outside. I can see it clearly, in a way that it is sometimes hard for me to see the places where I grew up.
It is the quintessential stance of the writer: you’ve got to blend in. You’ve got to pass. You’ve got to get people to forget that you’re watching, hard. And, really, they shouldn’t be nervous; the things writers notice, or that I notice, anyway, are not the things one might expect. In this case, there was a story I heard long ago about a family I barely knew, where the middle--aged husband left his high-school-sweetheart wife--a sad, but garden-variety, occurrence. For some reason, it stuck in my head. And then it combined with the feel of the sun beating down on a clay tennis court in the woods (a court I decidedly watched from the outside; I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a tennis ball), with the cast-in-amber interior of a beloved old Yankee house, and with the sort of crime one might read about in the newspaper and then promptly forget. My own experience with postpartum depression was given to a secondary character, and intensified. My one trip ever to the Connecticut coast yielded a place for Marcella’s escape. And on and on.
Where did I get the idea for the book? I have no idea. Is it autobiographical? Of course not. Of course.
As it happens, I still get to go to South Carolina occasionally, often in August, when I can sweat to my heart’s content. As it also happens, I wrote much of the book on the Cape. I belong to both places, and to neither. As a writer, it’s better that way. --Holly LeCraw
(Photo © Marion Ettlinger)
not worth the time
I read 15 pages of this book. Did not like what I read. The story did not draw me in - WAAAYYY too slow-moving. Don't bother. Too many other great books to read...
Brilliant writing wasted on a juvenile plot
Holly LeCraw is a great writer. That said, based on plot alone, The Swimming Pool may be in line for the next Saturday night Lifetime movie. It really is unfortunate that LeCraw couldn't expand her mind more into an original, not so Lifetime-y plot, because, as I said...the woman can write. Some of the descriptions in this book are just magnificently done, and there never seems to be a point where the narrative lags. But really? A cheating novel? How many of those have we had? Nothing about the plot takes it to a level we haven't seen before, and the characters fit the plot. Meaning they're pretty one-dimensional. The main characters didn't strike me as likable at all, but maybe they weren't supposed to be. I'm not so sure. I don't know if anyone ever really comes off well in a novel where everybody is having sex with somebody else. <br /> <br />With that said, I couldn't base my rating on the plot alone. Holly LeCraw has a lot of potential, and if she sits down at the drawing board for a long time before writing her next novel, she seriously has a chance to be somebody. She has the talent, but if she keeps writing 'family drama', it really seems like a waste. Either way, The Swimming Pool's not a terrible book, and I'd recommend it as a beach/airplane/rainy day read. But not really much more.
Unrelievingly dark and oppressive
This book really has little to recommend it. The plot line is heavy and oppressive in this "sins of the fathers" tale. The relationships throughout hint at incestuous leanings -- the brother and his sister, the older woman who slept with the father and then the son, the father who has a "wifely" interest in his young daughter. I'm certainly not averse to reading an author's attempt at nuances in relationships, but this book really spends too much time in that domain. Everyone in the book is miserable, and the darkness pervades every page until the miserable end. I was left with a depressed feeling at the end and wondered why I'd wasted my time? Hoping it would lighten up eventually?
Betrayals and Secrets Galore
Jed McClatchey is haunted by his mother's unsolved murder and his dad's death in a car accident a short time later. He goes to the family's summer place on Cape Cod to help his beloved sister Callie, who has just given birth to her second child and is suffering from post-partum depression. While going through some boxes in his late father's closet he finds a woman's bathing suit and suddenly remembers who the suit belonged to, the beautiful Marcella Atkinson, whose family had a summer place near the McClatchey years ago and who became his father's mistress. <br />Desperate to find some answers as to what really happened to his parents he contacts Marcella, who is now divorced, and to their mutual amazement they fall in love and begin a passionate, if doomed, affair. This is a novel that explores all the depths and crossways of love with its fervor and pain, and while it doesn't answer all the questions it's fascinating to read.
Good writing, weak story
From my wife: <br /> <br />"This author has a gift for describing the small observations of her characters' consciousness. She takes you through each scene with the character with just the right amount of detail. She also does a lovely job with describing the complexity that make up our human relationships, the natural intertwining of lives often missing in fiction. <br /> <br />Having said that though, I have to admit that none of the primary characters became dear to me. I never found myself wishing to know what would happen to them, or how and if they would avoid difficulty. I wasn't even curious about the murder that is a central part of the family history of the main characters. <br /> <br />This is a love story of sorts. Not a grand centerpiece of love; more like a sprinkling of romance, make that sexual attraction primarily, in odd directions. <br /> <br />While the story left me feeling flat, I was impressed enough with the writing style to be hopeful about the author's next book."
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