The Night Swimmer: A Novel [Hardcover]

Matt Bondurant (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 10, 2012

From the “remarkable storyteller” ( San Francisco Chronicle ) and highly acclaimed author of The Wettest County in the World comes a suspenseful novel about a young American couple who win a pub on the southernmost tip of Ireland and become embroiled in local violence and intrigue.

Matt Bondurant’s novel The Wettest County in the World was a New York Times Editor’s Pick, one of the San Francisco Chronicle ’s 50 Best Books of the Year, and is being made into a major motion picture. Now, Bondurant has delivered The Night Swimmer, an atmospheric tale infused with Hitchcockian suspense.

When Fred and Elly Bulkington arrive in a small town on the southern coast of Ireland from Vermont, having won a pub in a contest, they encounter a wild, strange land and the native resistance to outsiders. As Fred immerses himself in the life of a pub-owner, Elly takes the ferry out to a nearby island where she—to the disbelief of the locals—is consumed by her ritual of open water ocean swimming, pushing herself to the limits. Elly becomes enmeshed in the island’s troubles—the power struggles between an enigmatic goat herder and the family that has controlled the area for centuries—while Fred’s sanity wavers and their marriage begins to unravel.

Filled with lush imagery of the Irish coast, crashing sea, rolling hills, and rich Irish lore, The Night Swimmer is a stunning novel that exposes the dark and unseen crevasses in the human heart.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The premise suggests Under the Tuscan Sun: two Americans win a pub in Ireland and set about restoring the building and getting to know the locals. But there’s no sun here, either in the sky or in the hearts of the characters. Fred dives into his new life as a pub keeper while his wife, Elly, dives into the sea, obsessed with the otherworldly experience of open-water swimming. Soon Elly, when she’s not in the water, becomes enmeshed in the clannish rivalries on a nearby island, and Fred, his pub shunned by the locals, is drinking more Guinness than he’s serving. Bondurant, author of The Wettest County in the World (2008), uses the forbidding landscape of the southern Irish coast, blasted by wind and rain and always in the grip of the ocean, “a kingdom of darkness and cold,” to generate remarkable tension, both psychological and somehow atmospheric, as Fred, Elly, and the warring locals swerve ever closer to the inevitable conflagration. It’s a long journey from the Tuscan sun to Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, but Bondurant makes it feel as natural as the incoming tide. --Bill Ott

Review

"The poignant unraveling of a marriage, the fierce beauty of the natural world, the mysterious power of Irish lore, and the gripping story of strangers in a strange land rife with intrigue and violence--The Night Swimmer is a novel of myriad enchantments by a writer of extraordinary talent."

- IndieBound

"Bondurant's equally strong at constructing an emotional landscape: the fraught, error-prone conversations between spouses afraid of losing their marriage, Elly's clear-eyed descriptions of their shared interest in both the writers and the cocktails of the American midcentury."

- Boston Globe

"Bondurant's mesmerizing third novel, set on the isolated coast of southern Ireland, uses a distinctive narrator, Elly Bulkington, to explore Cheever's fatalistic notion, and in doing so Bondurant has constructed a melancholy ode to Ireland itself." 

- Star Tribune

"Bondurant uses exquisitely sensual language to describe the couple's erotic connection, Elly's experience of swimming (Bondurant is a competitive open-water swimmer himself), the earthy rural life and wild Irish landscape that catches them up as fate shifts from benign to violent in a series of explosive scenes."

-The Daily Beast

"Matt Bondurant does not lay out or wrap up his mysteries neatly, but that doesn't entirely matter: what stands out in The Night Swimmer is its atmosphere and its narrating voice....Bondurant infuses his third novel with a pervasive sense of foreboding and a final act that hits with the impact of an Irish gale."

-Shelf Awareness

A “powerful book….Cheever by way of Mario Puzo and Jorge Luis Borges.” —New York Times Book Review

"Bondurant has given us a group of characters full of life and danger....This is a story that will stay with you." —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Bondurant has written another nervy, robust and suspenseful novel.” —Austin American-Statesman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (January 10, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1451625294
• ISBN-13: 978-1451625295
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #285,464 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Matt Bondurant's new novel The Night Swimmer (Scribner) will be published in January, 2012. His second novel The Wettest County in the World (Scribner 2008) was a New York Times Editor's Pick, and San Francisco Chronicle Best 50 Books of the Year. His first novel The Third Translation (Hyperion 2005) was an international bestseller, translated into 14 languages worldwide. A former John Gardner Fellow in Fiction at Bread Loaf, Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State, and Walter E. Dakin Fellow at Sewanee, Matt's short fiction has been published in journals such as Prairie Schooner, The New England Review, and Glimmer Train, and he has recently held residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He currently lives in Texas. (mattbondurant.com)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 47 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars You go your way, Matt, and I'll go mine January 15, 2012

By Susan Tunis TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I have now read two of Matt Bondurant's three novels. I hate coming to this conclusion, but I think they're just not for me. We're simply not on the same wavelength somehow. The descriptions always sound interesting and intriguing, but then the book winds up a disappointment for me.

The Night Swimmer is the story of Americans Fred and Elly, but it Elly who is the first-person narrator. The novel's lengthy prologue ends on this ominous note:

"This is hard to describe now. I will have to carefully measure the tone. In my mind, it is a story without words, only the shrill cry of heartbreak. I think of how much time I spent with my head in the water, swimming long stretches of the lake or the churning green sea. I think of what happened on that windy shore, the broken harbor, a small pub on the edge of the world, and I am ashamed."

The catalyst for the tale is a contest held by a beer company. Fred bests all competition to win ownership of a pub on the Irish coast. The couple believes it to be a dream come true, and chance to make a fresh start at simpler lives. And at first they're happy, Fred spending his time in the pub, and Elly pursuing her passion for open-ocean long-distance swimming:

"As I read these horrid accounts, I strangely felt all the more confident of my ability to make the swim to Fastnet. I just knew it wouldn't happen to me. It couldn't. It was as if these other people had engaged in some kind of tragic wager with the sea, putting up their lives on a foolish bet, and lost. But for me it wasn't like that. It wasn't about odds, or my natural ability. The ocean was not my adversary. The sea would never destroy me."

It's hard to say when things got ominous, but that they did. I'm not going to spoil what happens, because frankly, I'm still not sure I know. There were hostile natives, strange events, a downward spiral. Perhaps someone a little more in tune with all things Irish can explain it to me. But it wasn't merely the overly onerous story-telling that I had a problem with. The characters in this tale were difficult to get a handle on. They were opaque. This likely was intentional, as it reinforced the Americans' status as outsiders, but it was difficult to care much about anyone or feel invested in their fates.

Bondurant's prose is okay, though probably not as poetic as it's meant to be. I'm not entirely certain what my problem with Matt Bondurant is. I have trouble understanding what this author is trying to say, but the even bigger problem is that I really don't care. It's time for me to cut my losses.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Captivating January 10, 2012

By T. Dotts

Format:Hardcover

Books captivate readers for a number of reasons. Maybe it's a character that reminds you of someone you know or someone you want to know. Maybe it's a setting that you've always dreamt of. Maybe the plot engages your attention fully, refusing to let go even as it twists and turns.

If you're lucky, a book captivates you because of its author's voice and its author's awareness of how to build character relationships and how to maintain suspense. Readers of Matt Bondurant's The Night Swimmer can consider themselves among the lucky.

Bondurant centers his story on an American couple who win a pub in Ireland. Many people might take the cash equivalent of the prize, but Elly and Fred make the decision to leave everything and everyone they know behind. As Fred restores the pub in Baltimore, Elly spends her time swimming in the waters off Cape Clear Island.

Elly has a minor genetic abnormality (an evenly distributed, thin layer of fat) that allows her to spend long amounts of time in cold water. Her communion with the ocean is one of the strong points of Bondurant's writing, likely because he is a long-distance swimmer himself.

A side note - the locations in The Night Swimmer are real, and images are available on the web if Bondurant's word paintings make you want more.

Another strong point of the novel is the bond between Elly and Fred. Bondurant doesn't describe their love in over-the-top prose. He lets his characters' actions speak for themselves. It's clear these two love each other, which makes it slightly confusing when events of the novel begin to overtake their relationship.

Elly and Fred begin to feel the power of the Corrigan family which controls most of the commerce and culture of Baltimore and Cape Clear. The Americans are outsiders and Elly's growing awareness of the undercurrents on Cape Clear make them more of a target. Fred retreats into a novel he's trying to write and neglects the needs of the bar. Elly retreats into her swimming and getting to know Cape Clear. The two start to drift apart, but Bondurant never fully explains why.

It's a jarring flaw in the novel. Other plot points go unexplained. For some of them, this works - Elly starts to learn about mysteries on the island and she may not need all the answers. Some of the island's mysteries though cry out for explanations, at least for the reader.

Highgate, a blind goat farmer who becomes central to the story, may be more than he seems. As may the Fastnet lighthouse, which exerts a strange pull on Elly.

It's to Bondurant's credit though that these flaws are minor. The story is told from Elly's point of view, and Bondurant never once drops the female perspective, a feat not all male authors can pull off. The mood he creates throughout The Night Swimmer pulls a reader in. His descriptions of setting and character are active. Readers experience the setting as Elly does, not as a laundry list of flora and fauna. Even when Elly befriends a visiting birder (who offers his own threat to her marriage), her exposure to the numerous species excites the readers, rather than becoming a mind-numbing list of bird names.

The novel builds exquisitely to a series of climaxes before ending on what may seem an abrupt note. Perhaps that's an area for improvement in Bondurant's writing. Or perhaps it's just a sign of not wanting to find yourself on the last pages of a book.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, beautiful writing and remarkable storytelling January 10, 2012

By Wendy L. Hines VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

Fred and Elly have a good life, but it's busy. So when Fred wins an Irish Pub in Ireland in a dart competition, they decide to pack it all up and move. Fred studies up on how to run a pub, and Elly is anxious to swim in the waters. She's a long distance swimmer and she's extraordinarily good at it. She has a skin condition that gives her a higher fat density, making it easier for her to float and not drown.

When they arrive, it takes a while to get the pub, called the Nightjar, into working order. While Fred works with various contractors to get the pub ready to open, Elly goes to Cape Clear, a nearby island. There, she stays at a bed and breakfast and begins to know the locals and about the ancient clan, descended from Irish saints, who have ruled the island for centuries.

What Elly really wants to do is swim the Fastnet, a dangerous endeavor. Also, Elly keeps seeing a strange man with no arms walking the fences at night, leading a pack of goats. When she questions the locals about it, they regard her curiously. They haven't seen that person and have no idea who she is talking about.

Meanwhile, Fred is trying to write a novel and spend time with Elly when it allows. Elly misses Fred as well, but her swimming seems to have taken over most of her time. But as the two of them find their lives immersing more with the locals, danger begins to surround them. As it accelerates, their marriage begins to crumble.

With a cast of likable and original characters, a dramatic and beautiful backdrop, a dangerous feud and a local intrigue, The Night Swimmer is a unique journey with complex plotting. Powerful, beautiful writing and remarkable storytelling, you won't want to miss this exciting novel!