To call prose cinematic is often to imply that its descriptions are heavily visual, focused on surfaces more than interiorities, and rich with sweeping panoramas, vivid colors, and dramatic action. Not here. While thoroughly cinematic, the forty-four stories in Terese Svoboda’s The Long Swim are shaped by techniques of the editing room more than the camera, eschewing  exposition and relying on metonymy, parts standing for wholes. Image fragments are more common than descriptions, and narratives advance through cuts and dissolves, gaps and overlaps, jumps in time and place. Readers who are comfortable with visual storytelling will be accustomed to these glimpses and shifts but may still find them disorienting on the page. Such disorientation is a feature of these stories, an element in their construction, by which Svoboda defamiliarizes the everyday world.

Although some of the stories take place in or close to filmmaking (the book is dedicated to “Eric who went to Hollywood”), what gives the collection its coherence is not a context, concept, time, place, recurring character, or narrative thread. Rather, what ties the stories together is Svoboda’s voice, which supports and drives the various narrators. I mean “voice” in the broad sense that includes cinematic silences, that is, the narrative choices, conscious and unconscious, of what to express, what to invoke by negation, and what to leave unspoken. So much is left out that the gaps and absences become as significant as what is positively drawn. 

Svoboda’s stories often start with an image without explanation or narrative preparation, as in this opening paragraph of “Horses on My Side”:

The light is bad. Fields flee on either side of the car in gray-brown, a beaten color. Acceleration exists at the ball of his foot past each of these fields but he leaves off pressing so hard, preferring the gray-brown to blur. Soon-moon, a kind of too-close rhyme, is how the twilight and the gray highway are going along with the fields, in an on and on that can only mean, in the end, Not so fast.

In “Mr. Schmeckler,” the close friendship between two young women, the narrator and Polly, is complicated by the divorce of the narrator’s parents, a consequence of Polly’s affair with the narrator’s father. Time moves rapidly here, as in many of Svoboda’s stories, and when the narrator sidesteps a confrontation with her friend, the scene ends with another sudden shift: “I don’t cry, although decades later my shrink said I should have.” (Notice the layers of tenses: present tense for the end of the scene that, by the end of the sentence, has become the past of a future expressed already in the past tense.) When, after another rapid passage of years, another sentence of extraordinary compression arrives—“Then, because my mother, who didn’t know me at all, is so dead, I invite Polly to the Cape while my father is away”—its impact depends as much on the energy of its compression as on knowing the four characters jammed together within it.

Late in “Where Fatherhood Goes Bad,” a one-sentence paragraph surrounded by white space does more work than its sly introduction of a new element of plot: “How is it that these people we’re related to cause such chaos, is not what he will say in the deposition he will give against his father the very next week.” 

There’s nothing anomalous about these examples, in form or in content. The Long Swim delivers a world of families broken and reassembled—of troubled parenthood seen through the eyes of children and parents; marriages, lovers, and friends betrayed; and characters like the woman, in “Burn the Bed,” who, many decades after divorce, is “hit in the face by revelation” as she discovers her former husband’s infidelities after his death.

For all their wreckage, these are also stories of survival and realignment. At the end of “Mr. Schmeckler,” with only herself and her father left alive, the narrator says of Polly: “She was my friend then and forever, and whatever he thinks to say about her, he is not worthy to say it.”

Almost any paragraph can read as a poem, and every story as a tiny epic, elliptical and suggestive, constructed of gaps and white spaces, attending as carefully to what’s omitted as to what is directly expressed. In “Niagara,” a story laced with grief, a woman driving through snow to the Falls, apparently alone with her husband, seems suddenly to be accompanied by their “grown children” of uncertain, even possibly changing age. “Maybe I stopped the car and picked them up,” she suggests, as if accounting to herself for their appearance. Or maybe years have passed, are passing, on this road, or in her memory, and maybe she’s just alone, or alone with her husband’s ashes, even though he seems so fully embodied and alive beside her in the car. Now and then, a story reorients itself so completely within the first few paragraphs that it’s necessary to go back to the beginning and start again.

For all their impressionistic uncertainties, most of the stories inhabit the present or past of this relatively “real” world. But tucked among the broken families and bad vacations, the road trips and accidents, the movie shoots and weddings and funerals from hell, two stories stand out as more directly satirical, even comically or darkly allegorical, leaving the world of recognizable experience for the surreal. In one of them, an actor seems to be frozen in his living room, simultaneously abducted by aliens and performing in an off-world laboratory or reality show; in the second, girls at a mall cruelly taunt a group of orphans on display in a shop window, apparently for sale. 

As each story fractures in its own way, the moments of fracture are reflected across the collection and appear in altered forms in other stories, much as the lives and relationships of the characters fracture and reflect across families, locations, and decades. The effect is so kaleidoscopic as to risk obscuring the stories in their individuality. This would be a great loss, as these stories deserve a slow reading—not because the book and its stories are long (they’re not), but because each small story requires calm attention to its silences to be fully received. 

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Terese Svoboda is the author of more than twenty books of fiction, poetry, biography, translation, and memoir. Her two most recent novels are Dog on Fire and Roxy and Coco. Her many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bobst Prize, the Iowa Poetry Prize, an NEH translation grant, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation grant, the O. Henry Award for the short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay.

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Catherine Gammon’s new collection is The Gunman and the Carnival, from Baobab Press. She is the author of four novels: The Martyrs, The Lovers; China Blue; Sorrow; and Isabel Out of the Rain. Find her at catherinegammon.com and @nonabiding on Substack and Bluesky.