Posts Tagged ‘The Swimming Pool’

Holly LeCraw On The Ripple Effect of Secrets

April 12th, 2011

We asked Holly LeCraw to discuss the role of secrets in her novel, The Swimming Pool. In this exclusive essay, she talks about the enduring wisdom of Sophocles and explains how danger can surface when family members attempt to hide difficult truths from each other.

When I was writing my debut novel, The Swimming Pool, and I needed to rest my brain from the logic of language and outlines, I sometimes thought in shapes instead. Specifically, I thought of concentric circles and of their undulating movement: the ripple effect. One stone thrown in a pond (or, okay, a pool). I thought of how the circles continue and how, although they get fainter, it is hard sometimes to see where they stop.

In families, tragedy has a ripple effect, as do secrets—the mother lode for a novelist being, of course, a secret tragedy. Secrets are usually the result of shame. And tragedy itself can result in its own odd shame: I think there is still an ancient and subconscious belief that misfortune is somehow judgment from the gods.

Maybe for this reason, parents often keep secrets from their children. They are motivated not only by their own shame but also by a fierce desire to protect. It’s a way of jousting with fate: one hopes that if a secret can stay hidden, a child can unwittingly escape. But secrets are toxic, and even if they are unspoken, their presence is felt. Children, in particular, always know when things are not being said.

In The Swimming Pool, secrets abound. One of my protagonists, Jed, wonders if his father killed his mother but can’t bear to say this out loud; his secret fear has paralyzed him. My other protagonist, Marcella, had an affair—with Jed’s father. Jed, in a wild, or not-so-wild, guess, confronts Marcella years later, and exposes her secret—and then, joined by their grief and guilt, they fall into an affair of their own that, remarkably, will help them heal. While they are having this secret liaison, however, Jed’s sister, Callie, the mother of a newborn, is trying to keep her own desperate and sometimes violent thoughts hidden from everyone, including herself. And all along, other questions loom: who killed Jed’s mother? Will they find out who threw that stone, and why, or will it stay a secret to them all—and what will the effects of this uncertainty be?

Readers have commented on the Oedipal overtones of Jed and Marcella’s relationship (although, fear not, she does not turn out to be his mother). Recently, I finally read Oedipus Rex for the first time, and was amazed at how vital and gripping it is, twenty-four centuries later. And, in good postmodern style, I wondered about the role of secrets: what if Oedipus had known he was adopted? What if Jocasta, his mother/wife, had admitted she had not killed her son—the infant Oedipus—as the king had commanded, but had sent him off to secret safety? What if the witnesses to Oedipus’ murder of his father, who had known what they were seeing, hadn’t fled, taking their secret knowledge with them? Well, then, there would have been no play. Or there would have been a tragedy, but a smaller one. There would have been peace.

But, as Sophocles wrote, sounding like a twenty-first century psychologist, “The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.” He knew that secrets would always be a given. And then, as it is now, it’s the secrets—the stones thrown into a pond whose ripples cannot be hidden—that beget story.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Swimming Pool, and click here to download the reading group guide.