The Night Swimmers

The haunting, elegaic latest from the author of My Abandonment zeroes in on the summer and early fall of 1994 for a man’s stay at his family cabin on Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula. Twenty-six and dreaming of becoming a writer, the unnamed narrator works on stories during the day and at night swims in Lake Michigan. At first, he swims by himself. Later, he is joined by a mysterious young widow who lives a few cabins down from his. Mrs. Abel, as he always refers to her, is a source of gossip for the staid vacationers who surround her, and she dazzles the narrator when she appears unconcernedly nude for their long swims. On one eventful night, they reach a shoal neither knew existed, and Mrs. Abel disappears, only to reappear a few days later with an uncanny account of her experiences while missing. Its story of repressed or simply forgotten memories making their way to the surface echoes the narrator’s sense of the currents of the Great Lakes, “subtler and more quietly sinister than those of the ocean.” Though it eschews linear plot and resolution, the book’s moody sense of hidden depths and dangers will intrigue those open to an atmospheric and contemplative novel. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Mar.)