The New York Times Book Review - USA (2020-08-09)

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17

WE LIVE INa confessional age. We prize
vulnerability, living out loud and truth
telling even when it hurts — especially if it
hurts. Not so long ago, however, there
were families who considered secrecy a
virtue.

Rachel Beanland captures this age of
discretion in her debut novel. Set in Atlan-
tic City in 1934, “Florence Adler Swims
Forever” tells the story of a Jewish family
struggling to conceal the drowning of a
cherished daughter for fear that her preg-
nant sister, Fannie, will lose her baby. Tak-
ing each family member in turn, Beanland
writes of this tragic death and tender se-
cret from the point of view of Fannie’s
daughter, 7-year-old Gussie; Fannie’s hus-
band, Isaac; and her parents, Joseph and
Esther Adler. The narrative expands to in-

clude the perspective of the Adlers’ young

refugee boarder, Anna, and the handsome

non-Jewish lifeguard Stuart. All conspire

to keep Fannie ignorant while she endures

high blood pressure and bed rest: “We

can’t tell Fannie. Not when the pregnancy

is already so precarious.” Gussie’s grand-

parents keep her away from her mother.

Anna tries to help out, while also begin-

ning clandestine swimming lessons with

Stuart. Isaac entangles himself in a Flor-

ida real estate scheme. The reader learns

a great deal about these characters, even

as they hide the truth from one another.

At times, the secrets in this novel strain

credulity. Culturally, the desire to protect

the family from bad news rings true;

structurally, the machinations involved

become problematic. It is hard to imagine

pregnant Fannie would be passive and un-

questioning for quite so long — accepting

silence from her sister, separation from

her daughter, strange behavior from her

husband and no word from her father.

When Esther broaches her plan to keep

the death a secret, Isaac asks, “How long

can we possibly keep that up?”

Two hundred pages later, the reader

starts to wonder as well. Beanland’s sub-

plots also require willing suspension of

disbelief — that the refugee Anna would

ask Stuart to teach her to swim so soon af-

ter the drowning of his friend and pro-

tégée, for instance, or that Joseph would

or could pay off his thieving son-in-law

Isaac so easily, making him promise to dis-

appear and limit contact with his little girl

to two letters a year. Sometimes the plot

works against the novel, so that an inci-

dent that initially sparks curiosity begins

to slow the narrative. The book begins

with the drowning of Florence Adler, and

the vivacious spirit of this brilliant young

swimmer haunts each character. The dan-

ger here is that the reader has not had a

chance to get to know Florence or to care

about her before she dies on Page 14. We

cannot possibly share her family’s grief.

Despite these limitations, Beanland’s

novel draws the reader in. The situation

she describes is poignant and the charac-

ters she develops win us over with their

private grief. Beanland is particularly

good at conjuring 1930s Atlantic City, with

its small family-owned hotels yielding to

larger, more commercial palaces. The his-

torical moment is fraught as American

Jews try to save relatives in an increas-

ingly untenable Nazi Germany. We see

cruel obstacles to immigration, and the

growing chasm between European Jews

and their increasingly prosperous Ameri-

can counterparts. This is a book about the

American dream. The dream is not with-

out costs, and the dreamers are not im-

mune to tragedy. As Isaac says, “Nothing

about this is easy” — but the younger gen-

eration can imagine a future with unlimit-

ed potential, a swim that could go on for-

ever. 0

The Death Aquatic

Secrets threaten to tear apart a family in 1930s Atlantic City.

By ALLEGRA GOODMAN

FLORENCE ADLER SWIMS FOREVER
By Rachel Beanland
320 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.99.

ALLEGRA GOODMAN’Snovels include “The Chalk
Artist,” “Intuition” and “Kaaterskill Falls.”

AMÉLIE FONTAINE

IF YOUR HOUSEHOLD’Ssummer vacation
was canceled this year, console and dis-
tract yourself with “Lake Life,” the tale of a
family getaway gone very wrong. The nov-
el opens with a fatal accident, setting the
tone and pace for what follows. Within the
first few pages we have met the members
of the Starling clan, along with their fail-
ings and secrets: an infidelity, a long-ago
loss, a problematic pregnancy and an im-

pressive variety of addictions. The secrets
are only precariously kept, and conceal-
ment is corrosive.
Richard and Lisa are the parents of two
grown sons, Michael and Thad. Also along
for the week at the North Carolina lake are
Michael’s wife, Diane, and Thad’s partner,
Jake. Richard and Lisa, successful aca-
demics heading toward retirement, an-
nounce that the family’s longtime vacation

home is being sold in a week. The sons are

left feeling blindsided and resentful, griev-

ing for the site of many childhood memo-

ries.

But the house, a converted double-wide

trailer, has seen better days. So has the

horseshoe set, the croquet game, the tele-

scope used for stargazing. There is a per-

ilous exhaustion and mistrust in Richard

and Lisa’s marriage, further burdened by

the pronounced failure to launch of their

sons. Michael sells shoes at Foot Locker, is

heavily in debt and starts his secret drink-

ing at breakfast. Diane is pregnant and Mi-

chael would very much like her not to be.

Thad has a history of suicide attempts and

sustains himself with marijuana and pre-

scription drugs. He writes ineffectual poet-

ry and lives off Jake, a young and much cel-

ebrated painter with his own issues of sex-

ual compulsion.

How have things gone so wrong? Not

through parental abuse or neglect: Rich-

ard and Lisa are in most respects admira-

ble and supportive parents. “Face it,

Mom,” Michael declares, in a piercing bit of

honesty, “your sons suck.” The novel is less

concerned with the origins of dysfunction

than with how it plays out. Here the likabil-

ity question arises, whether readers will

invest in characters they find unpleasant.

It is the bane of any author interested in

complexity and nuance, as Poissant surely

is. Michael especially is a tough sell. He’s

the kind of drunk begging to be face-

punched. Thankfully, someone obliges.

There’s a lot of bad behavior here, per-

haps because Poissant is so good at writing

it. His prose throughout is sure-footed and

intelligent. Wincing scenes are leavened

with moments of grace and mournful nos-

talgia. Poissant also leaves room for ab-

sorbing discussions of art, the socioeco-

nomics of vacation property development,

and religion. (It seems that anyone who be-

lieves in hell might end up there.)

All six characters share point-of-view

duty, for a densely subjective and immer-

sive vision of events. And there are a great

many events, perhaps too many, as if the

novel doesn’t trust its own instincts for in-

trospection and must keep hurrying us

along. Quieter moments, such as Jake and

Diane painting a picture together, move us

more than a problematic bit about a dead

deer does.

The family secrets are revealed, slowly

at first, then all of a sudden. How do the

shellshocked combatants respond, and

where do they go from here? The novel

achieves a kind of happy ending, though

more rhetorical than dramatic. The truly

likable entity we’re meant to root for is the

family itself, its capacity for love, forgive-

ness and endurance. Not every family is

redeemable. Jake’s mother failed to pro-

tect him from his father’s homophobic as-

saults: “She was his mother.... She should

have loved him, no exceptions, no matter

what.” The imperfect Starlings pass this

test at least. When it comes to vacations,

well, face it, they suck. 0

Trouble in the House

A lakeside family vacation goes awry in this debut novel.

By JEAN THOMPSON

LAKE LIFE
By David James Poissant
304 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.

JEAN THOMPSON’Smost recent novel is “A Cloud
in the Shape of a Girl.”

CYNTHIA KITTLER