Audrey Schulman, Swimming with Jonah, Medical school, expatriate,
doctors, literary, Indonesia, book groups, fiction, adventure, strong female
character
Swimming with Jonah
Blurbs
.
This
is no fairy tale... Schulman has written a creepy page-turner.
The New York Times Book Review
.
Feverishly
imagined tropical purgatory
Boston Globe
.
Schulman's spare prose
drives this suspenseful and moving
novel with the
enigmatic precision of poetry, fulfilling the promise she demonstrated in her
debut, THE CAGE.
Publishers Weekly, starred
review
.
This odd but engrossing
novel cuts deep and exactly to the
point.
Alan Cheuse, National
Public Radio
.
A
story fraught with unexpected tensions and physical danger... Flawlessly structured and thematically complex... The
novel's multiple thematic symmetries build in richly complex ways, intensified
by prose that is both lyrical and staccato-tough. Marvelously suggestive and unsettling... An
exhilarating and moving story.
Boston Book Review
.
Nightmares
have their own logic.
The Toronto Star
.
This story develops
believably, however disastrously, and Schulman describes Jane's dysfunctioal
parents, her classmates, the Queen's professors, and the tense life on the
small Indonesian island excellently.
Booklist,
.
Schulman's Swimming with
Jonah is ... a thrilling read that
illuminates a profound human transition.
Globe and Mail
.
Startling
in its surreal intensity, and exquisitely written.
Baltimore Sun
.
A cloistered pressure
cooker... Odds are you have never set
foot in a place remotely like Queen's Medical School.
Boston Phoenix
Plot Description
On a sweltering August morning, Jane Guy
steps from an island plane into a strange and dangerous world. The awkward,
insecure child of a world-renowned physician, she has come to attend Queen's
Medical School on a tiny Indonesian island.
For an exorbitant enrollment fee, Queen's is
willing to accept any American child of privilege who has been rejected by all
normal medical schools. Not bound by American law, the school specializes in
motivating problem students --no matter what the cost to each student. For
Jane, given the transgressions of her past, Queen's is her last chance.
Surrounded by jungle and sea, Jane is plunged
into unrelenting heat and the psychological abuse of the teaching staff. The
truest connection she makes on the island is with another student, Keefer.
Together they spend their few spare minutes watching as Jonah --a shark that
Keefer keeps captive in an ocean pen-- slowly circles his cage.
As days extend into weeks, Jane feels herself
changing, retreating deeper into a body and spirit she no longer recognizes.
And as an aura of desperation deepens among her peers, Jane's determination to
succeed grows. Failure is the only way off the island, and for Jane, it is not
an option.
Excerpt
At her age, Jane's
father had been in Vietnam. He told the story frequently, the bare bones of it.
Jane, knowing him, had elaborated. Over there, he had said, for the first three
weeks, tramping through the jungle, all he'd thought about was the first time
they would engage the enemy. He waited for it. Jane imagined him: raised a
quiet and unassuming boy, grown up in Des Moines, always picked last for any
team. He'd never been sicker than having a cold, never broken a bone or had
stitches. He'd once mentioned he'd had a cavity drilled out and as the smell of
watery burning tooth raised to his nose, he'd fainted clear away. She put this
boy in Vietnam, tramping through the jungle, backpack strapped on, rifle
slapping against his ribs, humidity wrapped tight around him. He thought about
death, about pain and fear.
Three
weeks into the jungle it happened. A rocket-propelled grenade landed in their
midst. His friend, Jed, standing a few inches from him --Jane's father is quite
specific about this, he said Jed was standing so close he could have touched
Jed with his shoulder just by leaning a little to the side-- Jed is
disemboweled. Jane could see it, Jed falling over on the ground, the top of his
torso turned away from the bottom in a way that suggests two different men
standing near each other with very different things on their minds. Gunfire
stutters, all of them throw themselves to the ground, to the level of Jed. The
rookies fall with their hands over their heads, guns forgotten. It is their
first action. Jed is in such pain. Such pain. He is begging and pleading and
his hands trail through the leaves around him making rustling noises. Jane
knows her father wants only to run away. He looks at his buddy and sees nothing
there he recognizes, not the grasping hands, not the distorted face, certainly
not the way the base of the chest caves in toward an unnatural diet. He is
filled with a fear that this surprising thing twisting in front of him might
reach out to touch him, might call out his name. He scutters away on his knees
to get morphine from the medic kit. He gets a lot of morphine, two tubes, maybe
three. There's been some suggestion among the men that one tube would probably
not be enough, not for a normal-sized man with any real pain. Jed is six feet
four. Jane's father wants Jed quiet. He jabs the needles into the muscle of his
friend's arm, squeezes the tubes all the way down to the needles. His friend
changes. His hands gentle in their movements, then stop. He turns his face up
to Jane's father and his breath slows. His expression goes blank with surprise.
"Ahh,"
he says, "ahhhhh."
A
silence falls. Pure chance. A sudden complete silence as sometimes occurs
anywhere, even in a jungle, even during war. No one happens to fire, the birds
happen not to call, no one yells. Jed's "ahhhhh" hangs in the air. And
in that unaccountable quiet moment in that foreign jungle, staring at what
remained of Jed, holding the used needles in his hand, Jane's father understood
for the first time how the world worked. It felt like someone passing a hand
over his face.
He
was very concrete about this detail, mentioned it several times, in different
retellings. He said, "a hand passing over my face."
He
stood up straight then with surprise. The guns started again. Hanging there for
a moment, he looked down at his new world, his friend's face still motionless,
cocked, listening to something far away; the rest of the men, living and dead,
spread out beneath him on their bellies. His hair prickled with pity for them.
One bullet passed close enough to brush a perfect hole through the slack
material of his sleeve like a cigarette burn. Jane's father felt his power.
After
that his gestures changed, his voice. Within a month he was leading the squad.
And when he returned from the war, he went through medical school with a
single- mindedness of purpose that left nothing to chance. He specialized in
anesthesia. He patented the Augie Pump as well as the Halodine Delivery System
(HDS) which was bought by 3M. He got a percentage of the money anytime HDS was
used anywhere in the world, in births, in deaths, in gallbladder operations. He
married a beautiful Bostonian ballerina, Jane's mother, and was now the seventh
richest man in Connecticut, 128th in all of New England if you didn't count
Boston. He never stepped down from an argument. His friend during the war had died within five
minutes. Jane knew his wounds were lethal on their own. Jed had been bleeding
to death, exsanguinating as they called it. There was always the chance his
death hadn't been from what Jane's father mentioned once was an overdose of
morphine.
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