SWIMMING NAKED

Pent-up resentment and family secrets fuel this elegant debut about two sisters and their fraught relationship with their long-suffering mother. Wild child Lucy Greene has been called back from her art gallery job in Cleveland to sit by her mother Fay's deathbed in a Florida hospital. She is the only Greene to show up; her troubled sister, Anna, is hiding out in her palatial home with her husband and small daughters, and Frank, their father, has disappeared, struck by lightning during a family summer by the lake, never quite recovering his senses and wandering off shortly afterward. But unbeknownst to Lucy or Anna, Fay has been keeping tabs on Frank from afar in the two decades since, and from her hospital bed, she imperiously dispatches Lucy to go make her peace with him. Fragmented scenes from the girls' rocky childhood are woven throughout the narrative. Sims is particularly adept at evoking the aftermath of Frank's disappearance: everyone must minister to Anna, whose frequent terrors have worsened and culminate in nights spent knocking her head against the wall. The present-day scenes are less satisfying: like the photographs Lucy loves, they are delicate and exquisite individually, but never add up to much. At times the writing feels photographic, too, precise, deliberate and nearly clinical. But the moments that work—most notably the scene in a Florida Wal-Mart, where Lucy's hospital pager goes off, and she finds herself frozen in an over-wide aisle with her hands full of flashlight batteries—are unforgettable and will melt the hardest of hearts. (Mar. 22)