swimming
The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka / Knopf
LET'S SAY YOU are a third of the way through Julie Otsuka’s latest book, The Swimmers, and someone asks you to describe the story. If you have encountered her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, you might comment on the familiar reliability of the collective “We,” the prevalence of lists, the cataloguing of characters’ habits and choices.
But if you prefer to be concise (so you can return to your reading), you would say the novel is about a group of swimmers who belong to an underground pool in their town. Above ground, they struggle with “bad backs, fallen arches, shattered dreams, broken hearts, anxiety, melancholia, anhedonia,” among other afflictions. But down below, in the pool, they can rely on the consistency of lanes, their lap counts, and their rules. They can even tolerate occasional rule breakers and bad management. Everything makes sense until a mysterious crack appears at the bottom of the pool.
Soon, one crack develops into many. When experts cannot find the origin of the anomaly, it leads to one conclusion: The pool must close.
Michael Phelps photo: Randy Miramontez / Shutterstock.com
Michael Phelps was accomplishing things no one in recorded history has ever done before. I can’t explain or really comprehend how he can do it. And although he did them, I attribute his physiology and gifts to God. So is what he does in the Olympics a miracle?
It almost seems that we worship him as if they were miraculous acts. We literally put him up on a pedestal and adore him, much like how people adored Jesus. And just like with Jesus, these amazing feats, whether or not they are literally miraculous acts, are simply not enough. The fall will inevitably come.
If they were, Jesus wouldn’t have been abandoned at his most vulnerable moment. Some will argue that he saved the biggest and best for last, raising from the dead, which finally put all of his doubters in their place. Really? Then why are our numbers, at least in the Western World, in such precipitous decline?