This is a sometimes-unfocused novel that takes a while to get going, although it does impress with its dedication to subverting the tropes of coming-of-age stories, adolescent queer romance stories and high-achieving-Asian-daughter stories. Though Ren sacrifices everything in her bid to become a mythical creature, her transformation bears the bloody limitations of the material world, rather than transporting her and the reader into the supernatural. It doesn’t inhabit the fantastical realm so much as the realm of physically and psychologically induced stress. But instead, the novel is earnest, and staunchly set in the recognizable world. She tells us the painful story of what led to her defection from humankind-which her family, peers and her closest friend Cathy seem to have experienced as her disappearance–or possibly her death.Ĭhlorine’s dust jacket copy led me to expect queer campiness the combination of high-level competitive athletes, lesbian longing and mythological transformation sounds like a recipe for humour and absurdism on a grand scale. “For too long you’ve been inundated by G-rated fairy tales,” Ren tells us, “the blood and dirt in their original drafts scrubbed clean by salarymen in suits.” The narrator is a future Ren, who claims to be a mermaid. Ren Yu is a competitive swimmer at her high school in Pittsburgh we quickly learn that she hates her fellow humans and is intent on becoming a mermaid-not the pretty Disneyfied kind, but one of the vicious types who lure men to their deaths. Its protagonist is one of the star swimmers on her team, idolized and crushed on by another swimmer-failure in this story doesn’t so much happen in the pool as it does in the everyday struggle to exist outside the water.
Though not marketed as YA, it explores themes of adolescent identity formation and failure, from within the chemical waters of the high school pool. Jade Song’s debut novel, Chlorine, is an uneven but ambitious contribution to queer swimming fiction.
Like Chen’s novel, Dryland also dwells in failure-Julie, its protagonist, is on the swim team, but she isn’t by any measure a fast swimmer, nor has she “figured out” her queerness, as so many of us did not or could not in adolescence. It isn’t overtly queer, but there is a queerness in its contention with what happens outside and beside commonly acknowledged forms of success, wide of the goalposts of “normative time.” I treasured Sara Jaffe’s Dryland, set in the early 1990s in Portland, a lesbian coming-of-age story whose idiosyncratic protagonist joins the swim team to pursue a crush, despite some dark swimming-related family history. I found companionship in Anelise Chen’s So Many Olympic Exertions, a ruminative novel about sports, writing and failure. I was introduced to Céline Sciamma’s films via La naissance des pieuvres, a tale of queer longing, teen power dynamics and synchronized swimming. I devoured Alexander Chee’s gorgeous, propulsive novel, Edinburgh-the story of a young Korean-American queer boy who survives childhood sexual abuse, and has to come to terms with the lingering trauma while working as a high-school swim coach in adulthood. If the story is also queer, so much the better.
There is something both dreadful and compelling about being thrust back into the days of early-morning practices, timed heats, dry skin, chlorine-scented sweat and hair, and permanent raccoon-like goggle marks. As a former high school swimmer, I’ve always been drawn to stories that are set in the pungent turquoise depths of regulation-length pools.
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