Swimming Studies by Leanne ShaptonBlue Rider Press (Penguin), 2012

In the last of the thirty pieces (some all text, some all images, some a mix of both) that make up Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton writes this:

I think about loving swimming the way you love somebody. How a kiss happens, gravitational. About compromise, sacrifice, and breakup. […]

I think about loving swimming the way you love a country. The backseat of my father’s car, driving through Toronto’s older neighborhoods to see the Christmas lights. Framed photographs of a twenty-six-year-old Queen Elizabeth above classroom blackboards, ill-fitting wool coats and fur coats, ice-skate exchanges. A community center pool parking lot at four fifty-five a.m., where sleet makes the sound of brushed steel against a car door. A frozen rope clangs against a flagpole. (The door to the far left is unlocked; inside, warm, the pool lights flicker on in bays.) Ever present is the smell of chlorine, and the drifting of snow in the dark. (319-320)

I love that passage, and I think it captures a lot of what I like about Shapton’s style, about this whole book. Shapton was a competitive swimmer in her teens, good enough to swim at the Canadian Olympic trials, twice, and this book is about her life as a swimmer, past and present. It’s about growing up in Canada and getting up in the cold and dark for early practices; it’s about hard work and sore muscles and the pressure of being a serious athlete; it’s about swimming’s place in Shapton’s life over the years, and now. I like the mix of description and introspection—the book is full of descriptions of the various places where Shapton swims/has swum—from a hotel/spa in Switzerland that offers silent night-time swims for hotel guests to a hotel pool in Canada that’s glass-bottomed and overlooks the hotel entrance to a phosphorescent ocean to athletic center pools that look much alike. I like, too, how Shapton explores her ambivalence towards swimming, or maybe just towards swimming competitively, and all that it entails (which is probably similar to what being any kind of serious athlete entails): what is all the discipline and effort for? What does it take out of you and what does it give you? Shapton also compares her past focus on swimming to her career focus as an artist: she explores the idea of “practice,” athletic and artistic, considering ideas of “rigor” and “brilliance,” repetition and “specialness.”

The images in the book are a treat, too, though it took me a second reading to really appreciate them. In a series of 24 paintings called “Swimming Studies,” all in blue and grey, vague human shapes are in motion in a watery background. (You can see four images from the series here.) There’s something dreamlike about these paintings, something that makes me think of nightswimming, but there’s also something huge and totemic about them: all of them have a line that’s clearly the surface of the water, but some of them, looked at a certain way, make me think of an aerial view of land and water: a person-shaped lake, or a chalk figure like the Uffington white horse. These paintings were underwhelming when I looked at them on the train home from work, in the bad fluorescent lighting of a subway car, but gorgeous in full sun outside, reading on the fire escape on a warm September morning. Similarly, I wasn’t crazy about the 71 small paintings of pools in “Swimming Pools” at first—I’d seen some of these images in full color online and was disappointed by the dark-blue-and-grey renderings in the book. But then I remembered how Shapton, earlier in the book, had mentioned her fondness for Ellsworth Kelly’s “Dark Blue Curve”, and seeing the images in the book—six to a page, rectangles and other pool-shapes seen at varying angles—as Kelly-ish made me like them more. By contrast, “Size,” which features black and white photos of some of Shapton’s collection of swimsuits, each on a dress form, with information about when/where she bought or wore them, immediately appealed. The pictures present the swimsuits like artifacts from a museum, with notes about use and provenance, and are interspersed with a narrative that touches on swimming experiences past and present, often related to issues of size, weight, food, and the body.

I’ve read Swimming Studies twice now: I liked it so much that when I finished it, I immediately started over from the beginning, which I don’t often do with narrative nonfiction. Whether Shapton is writing about the corrections a coach gives a swimmer or about baking a lemon cake or about visualizing a race beforehand (practicing her breathing while making breakfast in the kitchen in the very early morning), her prose is precise and lovely. And her insights are sharp: there’s one passage when she talks about watching her now-husband swim in the ocean on their first vacation together, where she writes this: “Watching him in the waves, I realize he doesn’t see life as rigor and deprivation. To him it’s something to enjoy, where the focus is not on how to win, but how to flourish” (136). That’s a far cry from the “total focus and total sacrifice” that swimming competitively demands (that phrase is from a memo to the team from one of Shapton’s coaches, during her Olympic trial days) (202). Part of the pleasure of the book, I think, is in watching Shapton explore things like this: in figuring out what swimming means and has meant to her, she’s figuring out how she is and has been in the world, and also noticing other ways to be.


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