No Diving Allowed is a collection of lively, wily stories that creep up from behind to pack unexpected punches. In this glorious scrap-box of richly-patterned fragments, each story is an all-too-brief immersion in a fully-formed world. The linking theme is swimming pools, yet Louise Marburg’s writing is so deft that it takes a while for their central role to become apparent. When it does, the pools become a metaphor for the short story: a curated containment of elemental power.

Ever-changing, the water in swimming pools has surface and depths, reflections and refractions. There is a shallowness to the wife in “Wildebeest,” who waits until her husband inherits before divorcing him; and profundity in the character in “Attractive Nuisance” who suddenly welcomes in an unfortunate child to his life simply because “he couldn’t throw, and he couldn’t swim, and his father was a dick.” A swimming pool ostensibly allows us to enjoy water without wider danger, though “The Bottom of the Deep End,” in which a seemingly happy-go-lucky uncle drowns himself, reminds us that tragedy is never far away.

Of course, only people in certain socio-economic groups can afford swimming pools, and so the collection’s themes are reflected through this prism of privilege. Marburg fearlessly and forensically uses the American middle classes to examine life, death, childlessness, betrayal, and love. Her characters shoot off the page and tug the reader firmly into their stories. They are unpredictable, complex, and utterly believable. Obese Gareth, in the eponymous “No Diving Allowed,” becomes an unlikely hero when he defies a lifeguard to cannonball twice into the pool at the request of a bullied kid. In “Creamer’s House,” William Prout steals a string of pearls from his new neighbours to give to his daughter, who is too worn down to ever wear them.

Throughout the book, characters behave terribly, casually hurting each other, and misunderstandings and quarrels are rife. The empty, cracked pool in “Minor Thefts” is used by Emma, the story’s teenage protagonist, as a weed-smoking hideout, whilst her parents are absorbed in the drama of their divorce. Inherited patterns of unwholesome behaviour ripple across “Identical,” and “Play Nice,” as family members’ differing perspectives distort the truth. Yet other characters act with sudden and unexpected sweetness. In “All Pies Look Delicious,” a husband — one half of an elegant couple — reveals his incipient dementia in the way he begins to “spit quiet yet startling obscenities.” His host covers up the accompanying physical violence by pretending to slip into the pool when, in fact, he was pushed. In Marburg’s world, nothing is predictable and there are no stereotypes.

The writing is crisp and pointed. Marburg has the knack of conveying huge themes in small snapshots. In the case of “Dulaney Girls,” she does this quite literally, as the main character, Loretta, confronts a wall of photographs and feels her isolation: “She looked at Janet’s stairway wall, where a dozen photographs recorded decades of family life. When Janet was on her deathbed, it would be standing room only. Loretta would die alone.” This economy gives Marburg’s stories a particularly vivid sense of place. Describing the “smothering cosiness” of a B&B, Marburg need only mention the “doilied surfaces and cabbage rose upholstery, bed linens redolent of the musk of past guests,” and the reader is there in person. The French countryside of “Let Me Stay With You” has golden-brown hills “like the backs of sea-lions.”

The sea is the elemental, unpredictable contrast to the man-made artificiality of a swimming pool; in this collection, the author uses the neatly-edged containment of the pool to explore huge, natural themes. “Pulling Towards Meanness” features both pool and ocean. The pool is where childhood memories lie submerged and messages are found; the ocean forces sexual secrets and brutally beats up a character while her wife miscarries. Both bodies of water mirror the protagonists’ muted emotions and the mercurial nature of marriage. Man-made versus natural bathing places reappear in the final story, “Talk to Me,” in which the newly-married protagonist swims past the artificial barriers out into the sea, towards infinity, or death. Which it becomes is not resolved; instead, we leave her far beyond safe confines and heading out to the unknown.Whether Marburg is writing of pools or oceans, her words echo and replicate aquatic undercurrents. Standing in a newly-decorated room in “Creamer’s House,” William notices the way that “the evening light on the surface threw dappled reflections on the walls, making everything around him shimmer and ripple as if the room were underwater.”

It’s rare to find a collection of short stories in which each exerts the same degree of fascination; Marburg has pulled off that feat of imagination and creativity. I cannot think of a better way to spend the dog days of summer than lying beside a pool wading through these intricate and surprising worlds.

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