Review of “The Swimming Pool” by Holly LeCraw

This is a book in which I did not like the main character. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a problem, except that I got the distinct impression that the author loved her female protagonist, Marcella Atkinson, and the effete lifestyle lived by the characters. In fact, I often felt the author’s presence – consciously trying to write in a “literary” manner, for example: deliberately placing commas, picking metaphors, and trying to get an A in a summer writing clinic. Some may find her writing lovely, and yet I couldn’t help feeling a bit clause-trophobic.

The plot is basically about two families: the Atkinsons and the McClatcheys.

Seven years earlier, Marcella Atkinson had an affair with Cecil McClatchey, one of the neighbors with whom she, her husband Anthony, and daughter Toni “summered” at Cape Cod. But Cecil decided (in one of the rare, true-sounding moments for me in this book) that he was more suited to his comfortable routine life with his wife Betsy and children Callie and Jed than the exotic, roller coaster affair with Marcella, and told her he was ending it. That same night, Betsy was murdered. Shortly thereafter, Cecil, still an uncleared suspect, died in a car accident. Nevertheless, Anthony and Marcella got a divorce.

Now it is seven summers later. Anthony calls Marcella in Connecticut and tells her that their daughter Toni has a summer job at the Cape babysitting Callie’s kids. [Callie and Jed are the now-grown children of Cecil, with whom Marcella had the affair.] Callie’s brother Jed is also staying there; after her second baby Callie seemed to fall apart emotionally, and her husband Billy can’t seem to handle it on his own. Jed is called to the rescue. Ironically, Toni gets a crush on Jed.

None of the children knew about the affair, but Marcella and Anthony are both distraught by the unexpected reappearance of the McClatcheys in their lives.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Jed always had a crush on Marcella. When he finds an old bathing suit of hers in his dad’s closet, he uses the excuse to go visit her in Connecticut. Marcella apparently can’t resist those McClatchey men, no matter what their ages. She and Jed begin a torrid affair.

Gradually, Marcella, Anthony, and the Omniscient Narrator reveal the secrets of the past, and the characters try to adjust to their newfound interrelationships with one other.

Discussion: It seems like there is more sex than conversation in this book. Reading this made me feel bad all over again for Megan Hart and her book Deeper. Because Deeper is called “erotic” literature, it gets consigned to a shabby little blue niche behind a screen in the Dark End of the Bookstore. Meanwhile, The Swimming Pool is called “literary fiction,” and I didn’t see them as much different, except that I thought the characters in Deeper were better.

Evaluation: I thought this book was okay, but I guess I get kind of sick of these stories about upper middle class people who don’t seem to have any social consciousness or think about anything but where they will summer and/or with whom they will have sex. It all seems very offensive after a while.

Marcella in particular really turned me off. Her big thing is being known – being important to others – but she doesn’t give of herself (except for her body). She is so self-centered; so unrelentingly narcissistic. After a while even she admits to herself that she may have manufactured in her head Cecil’s feelings for her. This makes sense because she spends all her time in her own head, and no time at all trying to understand anyone else’s wants and needs. Also, she has no moral code beyond “getting caught.” And worst of all, she equates adultery with killing for hire – they’re just different sneaky things to do, in Marcella’s world.

The mysteries of what really happened in the past kept me reading, so I felt rather cheated at the end that some of them were unresolved.

Rating: 2.5/5

Published by Doubleday, 2010