Splashy Novels for Summer Days by the Pool

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“Oh, the wild joys of living!” wrote Robert Browning. “The leaping from rock to rock ..the cool silver shock of the plunge in a pool's living waters.” The famous poet didn’t have access to the wild joys of cannonballing off a diving board in a kidney-shaped vat of chlorine. And yet, it’s doubtful that a plunge into chemically tinted water is any less wild or joyful. Everybody loves a pool, be it natural or backyard, kiddie or Olympic.

In these three newly published novels, characters swim, sun, exercise, recover, weep, and rebel, crossing from the shallow to the deep end of life. All of them feature exquisite, even numinous writing. All feature stories that show a side of female life that’s often hidden from view. And all are hardcovers that will resist a spill of afternoon rosé or an errant glob of sunscreen. But the books work equally well by the beach, in the park, in the backyard, and—as tested by our reviewer—in bed with the AC cranked up to frosty.

Swimming in Paris, by Colombe Schneck

In this smart, candid triptych of a novella—which really makes up a kind of loose autobiographical investigation—French writer Colombe Schneck comes to terms with her feminism and her sexuality. In the preface, she confesses, “At fifty years old, while taking swimming lessons, I realized that my body was not actually as incompetent as I thought… My body, by showing me how I was, allowing me to become fully myself, not a woman, but a living being.” The first story describes the writer’s abortion at 17, unpacking the fervor of her young sexuality and the harshness with which the world treated it. The second details the complexities of an intimate best friendship with a woman named Héloise. The third—by far the strongest—explores a complicated, post-divorce love affair with such honesty, such dizziness, that even trips to the chain supermarket feel romantic. “When we were together,” she writes, “he called me my love, my sweet, my little Schnecken, my open book, my dove; he always went on ahead to hold open the door for me, he carried my bag, he told me I was beautiful and hot, he climbed over the railings outside my apartment in the middle of the night, he brought my kids a toasted sandwich.” Ending of this laundry list of small euphorias, she writes, “And yet I knew this happiness couldn’t last.” It’s not heartbreak that makes Schneck’s story so moving; it’s her exact honesty on all aspects of love and intimacy. A deep dive into female life.

The Most, by Jessica Anthony

It’s 1957, a warm Sunday morning in November, and Kathleen, mother of two kids and wife of Virgil, a midlevel insurance salesman, refuses to get out of the pool in their apartment complex. Kathleen and her family have recently moved to Wilmington, Delaware, and are due at First Presbyterian. Kathleen lights a cigarette and remains in the deep end. Off to church her family goes, confused, only to return and find Mom still in the pool. Virgil heads out to play golf with his work buddies; the kids, to watch TV. Still Kathleen remains in the water, undisturbed by the occasional floating fall leaf. With this seemingly small act of female rebellion, novelist Jessica Antony leads us into the secret upheaval of marriage, good-girl American society, and a silenced female fury and ambition. Get ready, readers. The Most is exquisitely written, heady rush of story that you can—and probably will—finish in a few hours, before your sunscreen needs reapplying.

Body Friend, by Katherine Brabon

In this slim novel, set in Australia, an unnamed woman is recovering from years of chronic pain and a hip surgery. Her first day at the pool for hydrotherapy treatments, she encounters a woman with similar limp and begins to watch her, recognizing in her “a strange sense of identification.” She feels as if the two are mirrors of each other. “I knew the mental patterns associated with her pain,” she says. “I knew that she felt a grating anger at the back of her neck, that she did not want strangers to walk too close to her.” After a few sessions, she and Frieda become friends, pushing each other toward recovery. Where the complexity of Body Friend develops is with a second, chance encounter—this time at a park where the narrator meets Sylvia, who is also suffering from chronic pain and unable to bounce back the way the world might like. How these women’s relationships intertwine and reflect the ways they help each other—and hurt each—with their struggles makes for unforgettable study in intimacy. Expect to be wowed with lines like this, about watching a man and woman enter a heated pool: “Their limbs rose through the steaming white surface of the water as though emerging from a primordial substance, a birth of adulthood in to a new way of being as if we were all engaged in some secular baptismal ritual on this leafy suburban morning.”

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