A portrait of the author as a bounder

The four main characters in the cast of Clair Fuller's novel Swimming Lessons are Gil Coleman, the famous author of a best-selling and notorious novel; his younger, Norwegian wife Ingrid; and their daughters Nan and Flora. Supporting cast members include Louise, Ingrid's best friend in university; Jonathan, Gil's best friend, a travel writer; and Richard, Flora's boyfriend. Most of the action is set on a small island off the Dorset coast (actually the Isle of Purbeck), and the book covered is 1976 to the present.

Fuller's structure is interesting. After a brief present-day scene in which Gil, now in his 70s and for reasons that become clear in the course of the novel, falls off a sea-side promenade into the rocks below and ends up in the hospital, the rest of the book alternates between Flora's close third-person point of view and letters Ingrid writes to Gil in June 1992, the month before she disappears. Suicide? There's no note. (She hides the letters in the books with marginalia Gil collects.) Abandonment? Neither we nor the characters never know, which is fine. What's important is what drove her to swim to her death or simply walk away from her husband and daughters and the effect that has had—and continues to have—on them.

Flora hastens to the island followed by Richard and Nan. Tension between the sisters. Nan resents that she had to become in effect nine-year-old Flora when she was only fifteen. Flora is Daddy's Girl; Gil can do no wrong. Richard is impressed that he's able to have sex with a famous author's daughter.

The heart of the novel is the un-mailed correspondence Ingrid writes to Gil at 4:00 a.m. when she cannot sleep. They met at university in London. He was twelve years her senior, a charming, attractive man, her writing teacher who said things like. "Secret truths . . . are the lifeblood of a writer. Your memories and your secrets. Forget plot, character, structure; if you're going to call yourself a writer, you need to stick your hand in the mire up to the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, and drag out your darkest, most private truth." Gil invites shy, unworldly Ingrid to a riotous weekend party at his house on the island—lots of music, dancing, drink, pot, sex. Ingrid, disregarding all advice and a number of events that should have given her second thoughts, begins enjoy unprotected sex with her professor. She becomes pregnant. The university fires him and expels her.

Ingrid recounts their life together: Nan's birth, a miscarriage, Gil's betrayals, Flora's birth, and more. They scrape by on the island, literally watching the pennies until Gil writes A Man of Pleasure, a book so erotic they do not allow a copy in the house. Nevertheless or because it is so pornographic, it becomes a best-seller and the money and attention pour in—and give Gil new opportunities to fuck script girls and production assistants. Gil is, in large ways and small, a shit.

Ingrid feels helpless, a woman without education or skills, living a tiny life on a tiny island. Flora is not the easiest child (the jam has to be spread exactly to the edge of the toast). Nan is trying to be the Model Child and keep her parents happy. It apparently never occurs to Ingrid that, given the quality of the letters she writes and other significant moments in the book, that she might be a writer herself rather than simply abandon the family. It would not improve her relationship with Mr. Can't-Keep-It-In-His-Pants, but by her last letter she's acknowledged to herself she has no—and may never have had a—loving relationship with him anyway. (But if Ingrid becomes a writer, it would be another book, and my observation indicates how much I believe and am invested in the characters.)

Swimming Lessons is wonderfully well-written.We can see (or infer) why characters do things they themselves don't understand. It illustrates how we justify ourselves to ourselves. One might complain that none of the characters are sympathetic; I would disagree (and why do characters in fiction have to be sympathetic anyway). I do think Fuller tends to pile on at the end of the book, but I also agree the situation demands it. And a two-page envoi leaves the reader (this reader) cheered.

A wonderful novel in which nothing happens

This is what happens in Rachel Cusk's novel Transit: In the first chapter (they are not numbered) the narrator buys a dilapidated council flat in London. In the next chapter she meets Gerard a former lover and they talk. In the next chapter a builder visits to evaluate the flat's rehabilitation. In the next the narrator visits a beauty parlor to have her hair colored to cover the grey. In the next she participates in a one-night writer's conference at a rural college. In the next the narrator meets with one of her writing students. In the next, she and one of the builder's employees, an Albanian workman, go to pick up cement for the job on her flat. In the next, builders work on the flat and placate the downstairs neighbors who are as horrible as the troll under the bridge in the fairy tale. In the last chapter, the narrator drives to a Wiltshire village to attend a dinner party with her cousin and his new wife.

In other words, nothing happens.

There is no rising action; no climax, even within the chapters; no denouement. Events occur in the chapters, but not enough to call them linked short stories.

So why read it?

Because the writing, the observations, the intelligence are exceptional. Here's a description of the beauty salon in which the narrator is having her hair colored: "By now it was completely dark outside Inside the salon all the lights were on. There was music playing and the droning sound of passing traffic could be faintly heard from the street. There was a great bank of glass shelves against one wall where hair products stood for sale in pristine rows, and when a lorry passed too close outside it shuddered slightly and the jars and bottles rattled in their places. The room had become a dazzling chamber of reflecting surfaces while the world outside became opaque. Everywhere you looked, there was only the reflection of what was already there. Often I had walked past the salon in the dark and had glanced in through the windows. From the darkness of the street it was almost like a theater, with the characters moving around in the bright light of the stage."

It is not flashy writing, not sentences that call attention to themselves. But anyone who has been in a beauty salon or who has walked past a lighted shop in the dark can identify with this description.

Cusk is equally brilliant at describing people: "Amanda had a youthful appearance on which the patina of age was clumsily applied, as if, rather than growing older, she had merely been carelessly handled, like a crumpled photograph of a child. Her short, fleshy body seemed to exist in a state of constant animation through which an oceanic weariness could occasionally be glimpsed. Today the grey tint of fatigue lay just beneath her made-up skin: she glanced at me frequently, her face crinkled against the sun, as if looking for her own reflection."

Cusk has written three nonfiction memoirs and eight novels. Transit the "second book of a precise, short, yet epic cycle." The first was Outline, which I reviewed earlier. Cusk is taking ordinary events (see paragraph 1, above) and writing about them for what you or I would see them as—amazing, phenomenal, memorable if we had the insight to recognize and the art to record.

As a writer, I try to see how she does it. And I'm routinely struck by Cusk's observations about writing. Here she is at the writer's conference reporting another participants talk: "All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we're making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you want the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty."

Cusk neither debunks nor endorses Julian's point. She says she simply read one of her short stories as her contribution to the evening. She observes, she records, she makes art.

Someone has crucified a Jew in Petticoat Lane

When Will Thomas began thinking about writing a mystery in the early 2000s, he felt that many Victorian mysteries were written by woman and could be classified as "cozies." "I wondered," he writes in an Author's Note in Some Danger Involved, which was published in 2004, "what it would be like to create a more dangerous detective, a shamus, a gumshoe, and to set him down in this world of Queen Victoria and Jack the Ripper."

His detective—or, as he prefers to be identified, enquiry agent—is Cyrus Barker, who speaks Chinese, Yiddish, (and probably more), fights like a ninja, maintains a Japanese-style bath on his London property, employs a French cook and a Jewish butler and general factotum, and offers Thomas Llewelyn a job as an assistant and personal secretary.

At the beginning of the book Llewelyn is just about at the end of his tether. He's a poor boy from a coal-mining town in Wales, but he is exceptional enough to attract the patronage of a lord and to be admitted to Magalen College, Oxford. He has made an unfortunate marriage, his wife of three months has died, and as a consequence of an unfortunate circumstance he has spent nine months in hard labor in Oxford Prison. In a final desperate act, he responds to Barker's advert: " . . . Typing and shorthand required. Some danger involved in the performance of duties . . . " With his next move suicide off Tower Bridge, Llewelyn, to his surprise, is hired.

The first several chapter of Some Danger Involved introduce us to Barker, his household, and his world. The assistant's position includes boarding in Barker's house; an entire new wardrobe; instruction in detecting, self-defense, and shooting; and studying the books Barker has chosen: Methods of Observation and Ratiocination, Implied Logic in Everyday Life, Understanding the Asiatic Mind, and Folk Tales of Old Edo. Llewelyn's predecessor had been killed. In Barker's world, there is always some danger involved.


The mystery proper begins in Chapter 4 when Barker and Llewelyn visit the morgue to inspect the body of a young Jewish scholar who has been murdered and crucified—hung up, in fact, in Petticoat Lane, right in the center of a Jewish market. From the morgue they call on Sir Moses Montefiore, an actual person. He was a British financier and banker. activist, philanthropist, and Sheriff of London. He was born to an Italian Jewish family and donated money to promote industry, business, economic development, education, and health in the Jewish community. In London, he was President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews (thank you, Wikipedia) and—now back to fiction—he charges Barker with finding the scholar's killer.

Montefiore is concerned because at this time, the early 1880s, Ashkenazi Jews were flooding into London from the Pale of Settlement—now Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Molodova, and much of Ukraine. These are Jewish immigrants who don't speak English, who don't understand British ways, and who are taking jobs away from honest English and Irish working men need to be taught a good lesson. Sir Moses worries that someone or someones may be trying to provoke a pogrom. With no clues from the body or the scene of the crucifixion, Barker and Llewelyn set off to find the murderer.

While I am usually impatient with historical fiction, Thomas was able to engage me in Some Danger Involved. I spotted only one possible (and minor) error. Otherwise I was convinced this is the way London looked, sounded, and smelled in 1884. And Barker is such an interesting character, I was willing to overlook the villain's long speech at the end explaining how and why he did what he did. All in all an exceptionally credible debut mystery.