Book Review: Readings

By Lisa Kirkpatrick

Swimming in Sky

SMU Press, 241 pp., $19.95

Inman Majors' Swimming in Sky is such a rich book that it's near impossible to figure out how to dive in to defining it. While it's fair to characterize it as a first novel, it is certainly one filled with a distinctive voice, rare energy, and delicate touch -- all of which set it apart from most first novels. Swimming has the hallmarks of a classic coming-of-age story, but the main character already is "of age" and is not so much on the verge of defining who he is but, rather, what he should be. And it's sort of Southern, but not the South of Faulkner or Grisham or Welty. No grits are eaten. No tobacco is grown. But it is still, somehow, of the South and its convoluted admiration of sprawling families and ramshackle fortunes.

If you forced the issue of definition, it would not be inaccurate to say that Swimming is a sort of Infinite Jest-lite -- not as heavy in terms of sheer poundage and complexity but similar in theme. Both share a sports hero who takes a bad trip (think recreational chemicals, not a vacation gone awry). But Majors, unlike Foster Wallace, plunks us into the middle of his protagonist Jason Saylor's slack period and homes in on this character like a coonhound on a, well, 'coon.

Saylor -- Say, to his friends -- is fresh out of the rarefied air of Vanderbilt and back home in blue-collar suburban Knoxville. Say, like Majors himself, comes from a football dynasty, and both character and author grew up in the shadows of great uncles who were worshipped by Vol fans. In 1960s Knoxville, the Majors family (and, by extension, the Saylor clan), were like the Kennedys in 1960s America -- except not Catholic. East Tennesseans don't cotton to Catholics.

And as much as Swimming is about modern-day, 25-year-old Say and his lack of direction, it is equally about East Tennessee. While Memphis gets the glory for "inventing" the blues, Nashville the scorn for perpetuating modern country, and Chattanooga the props for hanging onto the train, Knoxville gets the derision of the rest of the state for not being Southern enough nor cosmopolitan enough nor Appalachian enough. Knoxville, through some strange quirk, got the state's major university, but there is little interaction between the students and the townies unless there is a sporting event or the college kids are looking for some moonshine.

And, like Say, the city is also wallowing in the quagmire of not knowing what it wants to be. Majors writes: "The red-eyed philosophers, the goateed gurus, Knoxville's earth mothers and starry-eyed boys who couldn't quite make it to New York or San Francisco, who couldn't quite make it in Atlanta, the scarred and wounded, the jive asses and profound, all looking for they knew not what in Knoxville, this island of Misfit Toys."

Even if you don't know thing one about this scruffy little city Say calls home, the fullness of Majors' characters (even Say's stepfather's pet poodle has a distinct personality), and the strength of his prose move this story, even when the protagonist seems to be simply spinning his wheels. At first, his clean, somewhat snarky voice seems distant, as if the reader is going to be forced to view the whole story from behind a slab of glass. As you move through these four months in Say's summer, you realize that Majors is more clever than you first thought, that the remove is intentional and the story couldn't be told any other way. Perhaps it's best to simply call Swimming smart and cleanly written rather than force it into some arbitrary category that, like its characters, it doesn't quite fit into.