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Letter to the editor

Dead, not gone

Family's past tangles mother's present in a Southern Gothic novel.

By Jennifer DeCamp
Published April 6, 2008

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

By Joshilyn Jackson

Grand Central Publishing, 311 pages, $23.99

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In a high-stakes poker game, an air of heightened anticipation awaits the big reveal - a quick expulsion of breath as a player turns over his cards with a dramatic flourish, the winner declared. - Reading a Joshilyn Jackson book is akin to watching the big reveal in stop-action, slow motion - her fingers roll back, the tip of the corner of a single card offering just a glimpse of what's to come. - Some might call it teasing. And some of the biggest selling authors have whittled this cat-and-mouse game with the reader down to an exact science, casting off chapter-ending cliffhangers like rain.

Jackson doesn't tease in her new novel, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming.

Instead, she strategically places these pivotal moments as a backdrop for her tension-filled, character-driven, Southern family drama.

Meet Laurel Gray Hawthorne, Jackson's newest leading lady.

She can see dead people.

At first it was just a foot - a missing limb once attached to her Uncle Poot. Eventually, diabetes and the bottle take both of Poot's legs before claiming the man himself. The vision of Poot's missing foot dancing around her bedroom sends Laurel into hiding underneath her Cinderella sheets.

Later, her Uncle Marty appears. His leering gaze and hand not-so-casually tucked at his Levi's waistband became "her own personal ghost of Christmas never."

But life continues and Laurel moves away to college, gets pregnant, marries and lands in a Stepfordish existence in Florida, leaving her personal ghosts of the past securely in the past.

Until the night the drowned girl appears in Laurel's bedroom: ". . . Ghosts had never walked in Victorianna. The houses were only twenty years old, with no accumulated history to put creaks in the hardwood floors or rattle at the pipes."

Suddenly Laurel's peaceful, middle-of-road life is upended. The dead girl in her pool is her daughter Shelby's best friend. Laurel knows Shelby's hiding something, but her daughter's lips are sealed: "Real Shelby trilled and yawped and gabbled dramatically and waved her arms around. She didn't fold herself up into an unhappy packet and stare at her feet."

Laurel needs to help her daughter, but can't - she's more likely to bury her head in the sand when faced with drama.

All the boldness went to her sister, Thalia, who sees the whole world as her personal stage. But Laurel and Thalia aren't speaking, and Laurel knows that bringing Thalia's self-destructive, manipulative histrionics back into her life always causes chaos and dredges up the skeleton-filled closet that's part of their white-trash family history.

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is not a breezy, audacious romp like Jackson's debut novel, gods in Alabama. But the writer's characteristic tongue-in-cheek narration and Southern wit bring an engaging lightness to the novel's Gothic undertones.

Whether she's talking about family "Laurel's mother had read the Miss Manners column aloud at Sunday lunch, reverently, in the same voice that she used to read the gospel" or making amends ("If Laurel had to eat crow pie, then someone should pass a fork. She was ready"), Jackson's novel offers a poignant glimpse into family dynamics.

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is not a novel about death, or even solving a crime. Instead, death serves as the catalyst forcing Laurel to realize that the innocent half-truths about her past have undermined her most basic desire - protecting her daughter now.

Jackson, again, delivers a page-turner, further securing her status as a must-read author in the Southern literary scene.

Jennifer DeCamp can be reached at (727) 893-8881 or jdecamp@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 2, 2008, 15:05:18]