The Swimmer (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

“THE SWIMMER” begins as a comic fiction written in the realist mode. As Cheever’s well-to-do suburbanites sit around the Westerhazy’s pool, complaining that they drank too much the night before, one of their number, Neddy Merrill, decides to swim to his home, eight miles away across affluent Westchester County, New York, via his neighbors’ pools. As Neddy begins his odyssey along what he calls the Lucinda River (named for his wife), the reader is struck by Neddy’s strength, determination, and youthful exuberance. No longer one of the story’s comically hungover, exurbanites, he becomes an explorer and mythic hero.

In the first few pages of Cheever’s story, Neddy covers four miles in one hour swimming in eight of the fifteen pools. Gradually, however, the pace of the story and of the swim slows, and the pools grow farther apart as Neddy’s energy and optimism drain away. Motion turns into contemplation, joyous adventure into painful ordeal. Appropriately, the light comedy gives way to a darker, more somber mood as the realism turns imperceptibly into mythic nightmare. The brightness and freedom of the first pages turns into the darkness and confinement of the last.

At the journey’s and the story’s end, Neddy finally and wearily arrives at his house, only to find it empty and boarded up. His mythic swim across the county and ahead in time has actually been a journey back into Neddy’s past and down through his unconscious mind. His attempt to regain all he has lost--his youth, money, wife, and family--ends in failure, leaving the reader to ponder whether the attempt has been mythically noble or childishly ridiculous.

Neddy is clearly a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, one who longs to escape from the painful facts of his actual existence and to return to an earlier, more hopeful, more innocent period. Having lost his world, Neddy, however, gains a certain measure of tragic dignity, standing as naked and dispossessed in Westchester as Shakespeare’s Lear howling on the storm-ravaged heath.