Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Misfortune runs amok in a story that can only be saved by turning the last page.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.

And when the book's big dark secret is finally exhumed, the reader feels just as cheated as its protagonists do. At once unsettling and hopeful, her book checks all the boxes of an engrossing mystery, but it falters in its pacing. They eventually land on their feet, even finding time to pick their shared love of music back up, but it doesn’t take long for the past to catch up to them. Now homeless and jobless, the twins scramble to find work and shelter, which isn’t easy for “poor people, country people” like them, especially with Jeanie’s weak heart. As far as they understood, their mother was given free rent as some sort of twisted reparation for their loss. No sooner do they bury Dot than they receive an eviction notice from the landlord, a man who the twins believe murdered their father. Apparently, there were debts their mother had accrued, and apparently everyone in town knew except Jeanie and Julius. While the death of their mother isn’t a shock, it’s what follows that unnerves the twins. She’s found that morning by her grown twin children, Jeanie and Julius, who are 51 years old and have lived with her all their lives. Based in rural England, the novel opens in a dilapidated cottage with the unceremonious death of a woman named Dot.

In Fuller’s fourth novel, when one thing is buried, another is unearthed.įor those familiar with Fuller’s work, it will come as no surprise that a secret lies at the heart of her latest tale.

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller