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    The Night Swimmers
    The Night Swimmers
    The Night Swimmers
    Audiobook5 hours

    The Night Swimmers

    Written by Peter Rock

    Narrated by Graham Halstead

    3/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Beneath the surface of Lake Michigan there are vast systems: crosscutting currents, sudden drop-offs, depths of absolute darkness, shipwrecked bodies, hidden places. Peter Rock's 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 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 narrator-now married with two daughters-tries to understand those months, his forgotten obsessions and dreams. Digging into old notebooks and letters, as well as clippings he's preserved on the "psychic photography" of Ted Serios and scribbled quotations from Rilke and Chekhov, the narrator rebuilds a world he's lost-those searching and uncertain drives, his vague wish to be a writer. He also searches for clues to the fate of Mrs. Abel, and begins once again to swim distances in dark water.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateMar 12, 2019
    ISBN9781684418589
    The Night Swimmers
    Author

    Peter Rock

    PETER ROCK is the author of several novels, including My Abandonment, and a collection of stories, The Unsettling. He teaches writing at Reed College. 

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    Reviews for The Night Swimmers

    3/5

    17 ratings4 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Started off really well. Beautiful, descriptions, inviting storyline. Then around half way I just lost interest, not much seemed to be happening. I sped it up to finish. Almost gave up.
    • 5/5
      This is a different sort of an animal when compared to Peter Rock’s other novels. He plays more with time; the story line becomes fantastical or down right surreal at points. Here’s an author who takes his reader somewhere different than he has before. Rock may lose some of those loyal fans, but I for one was most accepting and loved the feel, the texture, and the sexual tension that he brought to this story. He can’t explain exactly what transpired on one of the long swims in the dark waters on Lake Michigan because his first-person character wasn’t there for the disappearance. What?Okay, let me back up. When we first meet him, our never-named narrator is a 26-year-old recent college graduate who aspires to write (that part is most autobiographical) has returned to the lake’s shores and swims long and hard in the dark of night in the active and mysterious waters of Lake Michigan. One night he looks over and discovers he’s been joined by a woman who’s possibly more than twenty years his senior. They are well matched in their swimming abilities and eventually the young writer removes his trunks to match her nude swimming style. She, Mrs. Abel, is a widow and there is a curious friendship that forms around their swimming. She lives in a nearby cabin on the shore and has no shame about nudity. And while he is most definitely sexually attracted to her, they remain just friends. One night they swim to a new area of the lake and discover a shoal below the surface of the water. As they are both standing on it, Mrs. Abel disappears. He swims and dives all around and cannot find her. Later he even searches with a small boat, but he is never able to find her. After about three days—time during which he tells nobody of her disappearance—she is back and slowly talks about how she felt the shoal open up under her. She fell down through the opening and into a place where there were a series of rooms. The story is vague and nonspecific beyond that. Twenty years later, our narrator returns to the family cabin with his wife and two daughters. His family meets Mrs. Abel and the girls are truly fascinated by her. The full story of that earlier disappearance of Mrs. Abel is never resolved with any clarity and the book ends with no clear resolution to much of anything. At night, he continues to swim back and forth in front of her cabin, but she never joins him again for a late-night swim. This is a story as murky and with as many cross currents and tales of mysterious shipwrecks and disappearances as the book’s third main character—the dark waters of Lake Michigan. Ursula K. LeGuin said this of Peter Rock. “A master at making strange behavior and strange situations utterly believable and filling them with unbearable suspense.” There are a number of memories and repressed memories at work here. He even tries using some artifacts left from those previous time to recreate things, to discover some answers, but it proves unsuccessful. I loved this book, and once again I feel Vicky’s absence so strongly. I so want to hand her this book, and see what she would make of the latest from one of our favorite authors. In so many ways, I’m curious, curious, curious.
    • 4/5
      I loved the eeriness and suspense of this book.
    • 2/5
      A man in his mid-twenties moves in with his parents one summer at their summer cabin on Lake Michigan. He wants to be a writer, but he's aimless and not sure what to do. He does enjoy long swims, especially late at night and in this pursuit he finds a companion, a recently widowed woman in her fifties. They swim for hours at night, together, but silent and alone. He becomes fixated on her, breaking into her house, stealing keepsakes and, in one instance, vandalizing her cabin. Over the years, his fascination with her continues, even as she doesn't reply to his letters. Years later, when he is married with children, he meets her again briefly.This is a novel that I read grimly, turning pages and hoping for a moment of substance to weigh the thing down. No such luck. This is navel-gazing at its finest. If you enjoy semi-autobiographical novels about a well-off white man with a lack of direction and a poor understanding of boundaries, then this is the book for you.