Book Review: 2 New Books by Terese Svoboda

THE LONG SWIM, by Terese Svoboda
ROXY AND COCO, by Terese Svoboda

Each story in “The Long Swim,” the latest collection from the interdisciplinary writer Terese Svoboda, begins with a tangled paragraph of striking sentences. Characters cross paths in unpredictably baroque relationships. Narrators find themselves on the edges of the action — the wife of “a beloved-enough cousin,” “the only woman” on the expedition — paddling their way to the center of the plot. Call it amped-up in medias res, and take a moment to find your bearings. You have been gleefully tossed into the deep end.

The book’s 44 stories cover a lot of ground: New Zealand, Ottawa, Oxford, the Haight. A sinking cemetery built on a pond, the flight of a hot-air balloon, a town where a loose circus lion is reportedly on the prowl. There are hints of another world just below this one, giving the collection a destabilizing effect.

A father’s affair with his daughter’s roommate roils beneath a friendship. On the other side of a closed door, a stepchild is either awake or lost to a drug overdose. A story of a honeymoon seems to be narrated by the couple’s fetus — “just a cell or two or three inside her womb” — until the narrator comes into focus as their grown child, imagining the parents’ relationship from memories heard secondhand. In another piece, an actor goes “hard,” completely catatonic and unmoving, despite his wife’s best efforts to revive him. When he returns from his trance, he claims he was held captive, trapped in a place where “the reception was fuzzy.”

There is the sense that one could reach through each of these vignettes and overturn reality; characters struggle with the “too-close rhyme” of worlds hopelessly beyond reach. In the title story, on the beach at night with her family, the narrator sticks a flashlight in her mouth: “It lights me, my mouth so wide and red I’m scary, I could be a beating heart. Love, love, love.” As brightly as it shines, the light in this story and others turns off quickly. Most of the plots resolve in just a few pages, leaving the suggestion of other, longer swims rippling at their margins.

In “Rain People,” we meet high school students who serve as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film “The Rain People.” After Coppola gets a shot of a teenager in a phone booth, 13 other teens climb in. “It was the era of piling: Volkswagen bugs with dozens of kids stuffed inside,” one of the pilers tells us. The booth topples, the glass breaks, and this image illustrates what’s wonderful about the collection. Svoboda’s prose is similarly stuffed to the brim — with invention, surprise and the sweaty mystery of whom we get tangled up with, and why.