How to Breathe Underwater

written by Julie Orringer

This is one of the darkest books I've read in a long time. It appealed to me because it's a collection of nine short stories, all self-contained and unrelated — and since these days I'm hard pressed to read more than a handful of pages a day, I figured it would be kind of nice to be able to actually finish something inside of a week for a change. As it turned out, I ended up taking the book with me to Mexico on vacation, and I think I finished the whole thing in just a day — not because it was a particularly stunning work, but because I had more time than usual to lounge around with a book in my hand.

All of the stories feature young characters in the spotlight, each of them thrust into adulthood (or at least into very complex adult matters) far too soon, either by their own doing or by circumstances beyond their control. The book is sometimes painful to read, I guess because some of the stories stir up difficult memories of my own adolescence. Lots of self-absorption going on in those years, and that's true for many of the characters in Orringer's stories too.

The best of the nine stories, I thought, was The Isabel Fish, because it's the only one that seems to have any form of resolution. Like the other stories, though, it deals with a fair amount of moribidity: the main character is a girl who survives a horrible car accident in which her brother's girlfriend dies. She and her brother, in a clumsy but courageous effort to overcome the scars of that experience, end up learning "how to breathe underwater" by taking scuba lessons, and in the process they deal with some of the anger and blame that has hung between them since the accident. It sounds kind of dorky when I write it out that way (yeah... taking scuba lessons to get over the drowning death of someone close to you...), but really, it's kind of a cool story.

The most disturbing of the nine stories, I thought, had to be the very first one in the book. In Pilgrims, we see a horribly twisted plot involving all kinds of death and dysfunction. It features a sad and desparate family in which the mother is dying, another family in which the mom has already died, bratty elementary-age children who are completely out of control and see no problem with torturing one another ... anyway, the upshot of it is, some of the children actually kill another child and then attempt to cover up the deed. Don't look for any resolution in this story, because there is none. In fact there doesn't even seem to be a real ending — the story just stops, as if the author got up for coffee and forgot to come back.

One thing that made the book somewhat more interesting is that the author is perhaps from (or familiar with) my own stomping ground, as in many of the stories there are references to Royal Oak, Ann Arbor, and Chicago.

Overall, I think this writer has an interesting and engaging style, and certainly the stories are thought-provoking. But I don't know as I'd recommend the book, because I really prefer stuff that's less dark and morose — or at least stuff that comes full circle with a complete, cogent ending.