Swim Back To Me is the newest book by the award-winning author of The Dive From Clausen's Pier, and it includes one novella and five short stories. If a better collection is released this year, I will be very surprised, because Packer has delivered something a cut above with this book. The characters are vivid, the situations are real, the language is exquisite, and the emotion is captivating. You'll be touched time and again as you weave your way through these tales of human connection, suffering, and self-realization.
The opening novella, "Walk For Mankind," gets the ball rolling. A story of young love and its ensuing confusion, I read the 100 pages in one sitting, then closed the book with a lump in my throat. The story is told from the point of view of a middle aged man, Richard, who is reflecting on the autumn of his eighth grade year, when a new red headed girl named Sasha moved to town. Richard is not reflecting for any particular reason other than to stroll down memory lane, but it's obvious that Sasha was his first love. We soon confirm that fact, and Packer's rendering of those powerful feelings of first love in full bloom is brutally real. Sasha and Richard start hanging out on a regular basis, and their friendship is strictly platonic. We glimpse the dynamics of their respective families, who become entertaining supporting characters in their own right. However, the main crux of the story begins when Sasha and Richard decide to do the Walk for Mankind, and set about collecting as many pledges as they can. One evening, they head to the Recreation Association to collect signatures, but it's closed. While kicking around the parking lot, they come across a bunch of older kids smoking pot by a fence. One of these, Cal, is practically an adult, and Sasha soon becomes involved with him. This is the catalyst that reveals Richard's feelings for her, and it's sad to watch his powerlessness as his first love becomes enamored with an older bad boy. You'll have to read the novella to get the full effect, but you'll be glad you did. The story takes place over the course of one year, but it tells of an emotional bond that would propel Richard throughout his life.
Although the opening novella is a hard act to follow, Packer manages to keep hitting home runs with the five stories that follow. "Molten" is probably the most gut-wrenching, as a mother obsessively listens to CDs from her son's collection, and we soon learn that he was recently killed in a freak accident. This is an inventive concept for a short story, and Packer goes all out with the musical analysis. She uses lyrics from real songs (she chooses not to reveal song titles, although you can find them in the copyright credits at the beginning of the book, probably to reflect the fact that Kathryn would not necessarily know the names of the songs and artists in Ben's collection), and she describes the music in fine detail, allowing us to hear it as Kathryn hears it. This is the only way she can find to feel close to her deceased Ben, and she becomes obsessed with listening. One evening, when her husband skips a meeting and stays home, she becomes angry, feeling that he is denying her the alone time she has come to require. Kathryn lets herself go, forgets to shower, ignores the dishes, and simply immerses herself in music until she takes deliberate action at the story's finale, which seems to offer her (and us) some semblance of peace.
The rest of the stories are equally strong, but I'm not going to describe all of them. One involves a woman on her second marriage whose husband simply fails to come home one evening; another focuses on a dad preparing for the birth of his first child. Each story is realistic, involving a situation that could happen to any of us. Packer zeroes in on human emotions and makes her characters ring true within the course of concise twenty to thirty page stories. Moments of humor are woven in to balance heartache and grief.
I'll close by including an excerpt from the story "Dwell Time" that shows Packer's graceful prose in action :
"It was a Monday, which meant tonight it was just the two of them and her girls - his kids were with their mother. Laura was making enchiladas, a good compromise in the complicated culinary calculus of this family: simple enough that she wouldn't feel she was making nicer meals for her kids than for his, but also sure to please them, or at least Charlotte, who in all foods preferred things folded or rolled to things lying flat on a plate."
These stories are all beautiful, often painful, sometimes revelatory. Together, they make up the best book I've read so far this year.
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