The Night Swimmers

Swimming at night to compare its slipperiness to that of a dream would be to ignore the work of staying afloat the mesmerism brought on by the rhythm the repetition of the strokes. Beneath the surface of Lake Michigan there are vast systems: crosscutting currents sudden drop-offs depths of absolute darkness shipwrecked bodies hidden places. Peter Rocks stunning autobiographical novel begins in the 90s on the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin. The narrator a recent college graduate and a young widow Mrs. Abel swim together at night making their way across miles of open water navigating the currents and swells and carried by the rise and fall of the lake. The nature of these night swims and of his relationship to Mrs. Abel becomes increasingly mysterious to the narrator as the summer passes until the night that Mrs. Abel disappears. Twenty years later the narratornow married with two daughterstries to understand those months his forgotten obsessions and dreams. Digging into old notebooks and letters as well as clippings hes preserved on the psychic photography of Ted Serios and scribbled quotations from Rilke and Chekhov the narrator rebuilds a world hes lost. He also looks for clues to the fate of Mrs. Abel and begins once again to swim distances in dark water.