This is a different sort of an animal when compared to Peter Rock’s other novels. He plays more with time; the story line becomes fantastical or down right surreal at points. Here’s an author who takes his reader somewhere different than he has before. Rock may lose some of those loyal fans, but I for one was most accepting and loved the feel, the texture, and the sexual tension that he brought to this story. He can’t explain exactly what transpired on one of the long swims in the dark waters on Lake Michigan because his first-person character wasn’t there for the disappearance. What?

Okay, let me back up. When we first meet him, our never-named narrator is a 26-year-old recent college graduate who aspires to write (that part is most autobiographical) has returned to the lake’s shores and swims long and hard in the dark of night in the active and mysterious waters of Lake Michigan. One night he looks over and discovers he’s been joined by a woman who’s possibly more than twenty years his senior. They are well matched in their swimming abilities and eventually the young writer removes his trunks to match her nude swimming style.

She, Mrs. Abel, is a widow and there is a curious friendship that forms around their swimming. She lives in a nearby cabin on the shore and has no shame about nudity. And while he is most definitely sexually attracted to her, they remain just friends. One night they swim to a new area of the lake and discover a shoal below the surface of the water. As they are both standing on it, Mrs. Abel disappears. He swims and dives all around and cannot find her. Later he even searches with a small boat, but he is never able to find her. After about three days—time during which he tells nobody of her disappearance—she is back and slowly talks about how she felt the shoal open up under her. She fell down through the opening and into a place where there were a series of rooms. The story is vague and nonspecific beyond that.

Twenty years later, our narrator returns to the family cabin with his wife and two daughters. His family meets Mrs. Abel and the girls are truly fascinated by her. The full story of that earlier disappearance of Mrs. Abel is never resolved with any clarity and the book ends with no clear resolution to much of anything. At night, he continues to swim back and forth in front of her cabin, but she never joins him again for a late-night swim. This is a story as murky and with as many cross currents and tales of mysterious shipwrecks and disappearances as the book’s third main character—the dark waters of Lake Michigan. Ursula K. LeGuin said this of Peter Rock. “A master at making strange behavior and strange situations utterly believable and filling them with unbearable suspense.” There are a number of memories and repressed memories at work here. He even tries using some artifacts left from those previous time to recreate things, to discover some answers, but it proves unsuccessful.

I loved this book, and once again I feel Vicky’s absence so strongly. I so want to hand her this book, and see what she would make of the latest from one of our favorite authors. In so many ways, I’m curious, curious, curious. ( )

I loved the eeriness and suspense of this book. ( )

A man in his mid-twenties moves in with his parents one summer at their summer cabin on Lake Michigan. He wants to be a writer, but he's aimless and not sure what to do. He does enjoy long swims, especially late at night and in this pursuit he finds a companion, a recently widowed woman in her fifties. They swim for hours at night, together, but silent and alone. He becomes fixated on her, breaking into her house, stealing keepsakes and, in one instance, vandalizing her cabin. Over the years, his fascination with her continues, even as she doesn't reply to his letters. Years later, when he is married with children, he meets her again briefly.

This is a novel that I read grimly, turning pages and hoping for a moment of substance to weigh the thing down. No such luck. This is navel-gazing at its finest. If you enjoy semi-autobiographical novels about a well-off white man with a lack of direction and a poor understanding of boundaries, then this is the book for you. ( )

‘And yet to avoid, to forget is a kind of betrayal, pretending that there’s no continuity between myself then and now.’

I admit to never having read any previous books by Peter Rock, so coming to this autobiographical novel was a bit like stepping into mid-conversation, or arriving at a party two hours after it started. I feel that had I read some of his other work I might have got more out of this, but as it is, I felt that this was a rewarding and beguiling work which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The basic premise is this: the older writer that is Peter Rock looks back on one particular summer when, in 1994 as a twenty-six-year-old, he visited his parents’ house in Wisconsin and meets their neighbour Mrs Abel (whose first name, Claire, we don’t learn until much later in the book). The pair share a passion for swimming at night in Lake Michigan, and the languid, sexually-charged nature of their platonic relationship – younger man, older widow – is played out in these watery adventures. By the end of the summer Mrs Abel disappears and the central character - the ‘I’ of the book who both is ‘Peter Rock’ and yet is a fictionalised version of himself – feels her absence for years afterwards. The book shifts in narrative time between the past and the present, where ‘Peter’ is now married with two daughters, and it also uses photographs and letters and other ‘texts’ interspersed throughout the book (in an afterword the author says the book ‘is in conversation with many other texts, artefacts, images and songs’). These give added reference and structure to the story, but also make it very difficult to classify the book as simply an ‘autobiographical novel’ – for indeed what is the nature of that genre? The author is at one and the same time the writer of the book and the central character, a real version of himself and also a fictionalised one. In a parallel self-referentiality there is a text of story within the book which is torn in two, and finally united. This story may or may not be about Mrs Abel. When she is asked if it is, she replies: ‘It’s not so simple – you should know that. It’s a story.’

This is a lyrical, reflective book that plays with the intertextuality of the form and is a wonderful exploration of memory and our relationship with our past self-selves. It is a book about searching for meanings and living with moments of importance in our life that only later do we recognise. The ending – which I won’t spoil here – is suitably understated yet startling, and brings the book back to its heart, to its beginning: water, and swimming. I found this utterly engaging, and profoundly beautiful in its quiet, meditative style. It makes me want to go and read his other books, and that can only be a good sign. Definitely recommended.
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