rev. of Marine Life by Linda Swendsen
Linda Svendsen's lovely first book,
Marine Life, reads like a muted version of the work of fellow Canadian writers Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Isabel Huggan. Her stories, like theirs, are funny, beautifully written, emotionally precise tales about the lives of girls and women, although in
Marine Life the girls and women are all the same person — Adele Nordstrom, narrator of the collection's eight interlocking stories. While Svendsen is as powerful as her fellow Canadian writers, her work is quieter; her voice isn't as immediately passionate, and her style, though lyrical, is more subtle.
The opening story, "Who He Slept By," is about Adele's alcoholic brother Ray, who was born so far in advance of Adele that she says, "He has always been old enough to invent me." The story begins with Adele saying, "First our mother, June, although I can't swear." It's not a line that makes particular sense till you read further and realize that this elegantly crafted story is also a list, a list of all the people Ray ever slept by, starting with his mother when he was an infant, moving through his girlfriends and wives, and ending with Adele and Ray in bed during a storm. Interestingly, the appropriateness of the narrative device is evident at the very moment the device becomes apparent. Early in the story, Adele says of her brother, "If dreams leave the body in breaths, as evil spirits enter after sneezes, who knows what his gentle inhalation drew." Thus, the full complexities of Ray's character — which is, by turns, dissolute, kind, loyal,
irresponsible, depressed, cruel, and loving — are best revealed in the story of the list of women he is close to.
The structure of the entire book allows for a similar expansion and multiplication of the meanings of the individual short stories. In other collections of linked short stories, the whole diminishes the parts. Here, the opposite is true. Recurrent themes and metaphors link and elucidate the stories in powerful ways. At the end of "Boxing Day," the characters have just survived an accident in which Robert, Adele's stepfather, has purposely plowed into a tree. Adele says of her mother, "In that big cold quiet, she turned to him and kissed him, and kissed again, until she kissed him into kissing, kissing her back, until I couldn't hear the in, out, in again of our breath." Elsewhere, multiple individuals' experiences collapse into one experience that is transcendent, insofar as it includes other family members, but "descendent," insofar as it is a single experience, an experience of an individual. (The book's epigraph is Psalm 68: "God setteth the solitary
in families.")
At the end of the title story, Adele is pregnant and in a swimming pool with her mother, June. She says, "I realize we are all in the same water. I sense my baby drifting inside, and look at my mother, flailing towards the other side, and I am in between, some kind of lifeguard in the shallows." This identification isn't an entirely happy one for Adele, who is eager to escape her mother's sad history of too many husbands and too much false glamour. (Thrice-divorced June is also a cocktail pianist nicknamed "Beauty.")
Marine Life's final story focuses on Irene, Adele's older sister, the one person in the family who seems not to have a disquieting connection with both June and her capacity for failure. Throughout the book, Irene is presented as the one who escaped, even though escape means that she has become as conventional as the dull Belgian man, Peter, that she marries. Irene's marriage seems successful simply because it doesn't end, as all the other marriages in the book do. Still, there's a silence and a stiffness about Irene that sets her apart from the other family members who are, for all their troubles, often voluble and loving, even when they fail, fail completely, to live with one another. When Irene gets breast cancer, Adele enters Irene's family's home and life to glimpse, however briefly, Peter and his relationship with his daughter, Jill. Ugly as what Adele sees is, she allows Irene's interpretation of family dynamics to override both the evidence of her own senses — Adele hears Peter being monstrously cruel — and her suspicions — about possible incest. The result is tragic, and Adele's response to the tragedy is nothing short of stunning since it leaves the reader where all Svendsen's stories do. That is, with a conclusion that we are all literally in the same water, all taking the same breath, and all agreeing to live dishonestly, because that is the best we can do with the time and circumstances we are offered.
