While I was writing my first novel, The Swimming Pool, I often relied on sympathetic metaphors to keep my spirits up. My favorite was from William Faulkner, who once said that when he was writing a novel, he felt like a one-armed man trying to build a chicken coop in a hurricane.I think it’s that lingering memory of flying nails, not enough hands, two-by-fours at crazy angles, that makes it so hard for me to answer the question “What’s your book about?” Maybe it doesn’t feel like a whole chicken coop to me just yet. Maybe it never will, because I remember when it was only a big pile of lumber—the lumber being expressions I saw on my characters’ faces (isolated, unhelpfully, from any actual scenes), and crises I knew they had, but didn’t at first know the origin of, and terrible choices that I suspected they were going to make, even though they are not evil people. I also told the story from multiple points of view, and cut back and forth in time, because that’s where the truth of the story seemed to lie—in spirals and interconnecting circles rather than straight lines. (As Faulkner also said, beating me and everyone else to it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”) So maybe all this helps to explain why it’s taken a long time for me to wipe the bewildered look off my face when asked again, patiently, what my book is about, and think of an answer besides, “Life.”
For the record, though, The Swimming Pool is about a young man, Jed McClatchey, who is mired in grief for his parents, who died seven years previously—his mother in a still-unsolved break-in/murder. Jed falls in love with an older woman, Marcella Atkinson, who he then learns was his late father’s mistress; as one might imagine, complications and revelations ensue.
Two little sentences. One thing leading to another. Now, was that so hard? Well, yes. I hope that anyone reading The Swimming Pool would agree that those sentences begin to describe the story—but only begin. The book is certainly about the powerful, illicit passion that Jed and Marcella feel for each other. But it’s also about the longing Jed feels for his lost mother, and the fury he feels toward his dead father, and the protectiveness he feels for his sister and her young children. It’s about the tenderness Marcella always yearned for from her ex-husband, and the love she thought she had found with Jed’s father, and the fearful yet unshakable devotion she feels for her daughter. And it’s about the ways that all these loves and loyalties collide, like stones thrown in a pond, the ripples unceasing.
While I was working on the book, I was fortunate enough to be in a wonderful writing group. One evening, I presented a section for critique and everyone started arguing–nicely–about Jed, and why he’d acted in a particular way in the scene they’d read. Now, in a group like that, the whole point is to listen to feedback and criticism and decide how—or if—you’re going to revise, based on that feedback. I was taking notes and thinking, gee, this is all really contradictory, Jed must be a real mess–but then, as this conversation swirled around me, I realized that people had different viewpoints not because the scene was poorly written (I hoped) but because Jed had become truly complex. His motivations had ceased to be simple straight lines, because no one’s are. He had become a real character. He, and his fellows, are bundles of motivations that crisscross and intersect and fight against each other, and that spring partly from instinct and personality, partly from experience.
So what’s The Swimming Pool about? It’s about decent people making some dreadful choices, and about why. It’s about how parents will do anything to protect their children—even, sometimes, from the parents themselves. It’s about grief, and how difficult it is to move on, especially if there are mysteries unsolved, and anger unresolved. It’s about the ultimate loss of control: losing a loved one with no warning. It’s about falling in love, and losing love, and then somehow being ready to fall in love again.
It’s a novel. It’s not real life. But, like all novels, that’s what it’s about.
--Holly LeCraw, Author
