“Night Swim”
by Anne Enright
from the March 9, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
It took me a while to acquire a taste for Anne Enright’s work, but I’m so glad that I have. I think she’s got a nice mixture of darkness and humor, and I think she explores humanity with remarkable insight and subtlety. She’s about to publish a novel, Actress, but “Night Swim” is not an excerpt. As she says in her interview:
My short stories are only about themselves. They are the solution to their own riddles or non-riddles and, as such, they stay self-contained and indifferent to the rest of my work.
Very excited to see what we have in “Night Swim”!
Please feel free to share any thoughts you might have on “Night Swim” or Enright’s work in general.
I thought this was excellent. I loved the tone, the rhythm, and Enright’s brand of darkness that gets under the skin like a fungus. I’m not sure all that was going on, but I think she is so insightful as she looks at our anxieties.
I listened to her reading the story, so I may have missed something, but it seemed a nice illustration of Hemingway’s omission approach…. the story is so true, that she doesn’t need to say much about the story that explained the before, you “know” what happened…
I liked this but found it kind of familiar. I was reminded of Hadley and Munro–a middle-aged woman remembers some sort of transgressive experience–although Enright has her own voice and does create a nice sense of mystery and elision. The description of being disoriented in the black water is really skillfull.