Floundering Pre-Meds Swim, Clumsily

SWIMMING WITH JONAH

Audrey Schulman

Avon Books

261pp $22.00

Audrey Schulman's second novel, Swimming with Jonah is about Jane Guy, "the awkward, insecure child of a world renowned physician and a beautiful Bostonian ballerina" who goes to attend Queen's Medical School on a tiny Indonesian island. Queen's is the last chance for extremely wealthy students who have failed to get into any medical school. Tuition is the only requirement for acceptance. Isolated and outside the jurisdiction of American law, Queen's is "the boot camp of medical schools," motivating its students by any means necessary--namely bullying and psychological abuse. According to the publicist, thrust into this atmosphere Jane somehow manages to "retreat deeper into a body and spirit she no longer recognizes," eventually emerging determined to succeed. This book is really a high school pre-med's fairy tale disguised as a Bildungsroman.

Its characters are stylized and predictable, from her distant father and elegant mother to the Swedish personal trainer named Greta. Her parents have all the standard trappings of wealth: mansion in Connecticut, Florida beach house, Aspen condo. Even the psychological background created through carefully spliced-in childhood flashbacks is contrived and formulaic. It is textbook. Her parents were never physical with their child...they were never physical with one another...they never yelled, but "Silence was the weapon" in their household. Jane feels perpetually inferior to them. Estranged from her identity, haunted by her parent's expectations, rejected by medical schools, Queen's is the only alternative for her. There, in a small community of desperate students, over the course of a long first year of heat and studying, Jane begins to change. She becomes detached from herself, mechanically enduring the labors of classwork while her personality (finally freed from her parents' over-whelming influence) plays with the primitive imagery of the island. This section of the book almost resembles Apocalypse Now--it depicts a slow, insane voyage punctuated by the methodical expulsion of students around her, picked off one by one by the sniping, brutal and pitiless teachers. These teachers are every premed's nightmare--a series of Nurse Ratcheds bent on tormenting the weakest and the strongest alike. However, Jane slips through this carnage and, supposedly, beings to grow.

Though Jane's character is constantly worked on--even labored at--it is so insubstantial, so suppressed by its own struggle to define itself that Jane never appears to us as a real person. This is the novel's greatest setback: it doesn't manage to outgrow its fairy tale from. We have the castle, the king and the queen. We have the princess who doesn't fit into her role, who pretends to an identity of her own, who steps out of line. We have a sort of conflict, a sort of quest, and eventually our princes resolves to achieve 'success,' which is defined as eventually assuming the same as that of her father. Throughout the book, characters remain confined in their predetermined roles; they are kept at a distance from the reader, never moving outside of their predictable orbits. Even our protagonist only goes through of the motions of change, of "coming of age." This psychological change is paralleled or rather symbolized by a slow loss of weight and a gaining of beauty. She becomes slowly aware of a new sexual identity growing along with her intellectual capacities, and it is really on this aspect of her odyssey that the novel dwells. This sexual flowering as a physical manifestation of Jane's spiritual awakening has rather disturbing implications. She begins the novel as a pudgy, insecure nonentity and she finishes it as a slender, successful, pretty non-entity. Her "change" is really the fulfilling of a chauvinistic societal ideal.

At this point, you may be wondering why this novel is called Swimming with Jonah. At Queen's, Jane meets a second year student called Keefer. Keefer is "bony as a bird," a gaunt, nervous man with an uncontrollable stutter. Having flunked one of his first-year classes, Keefer is marked out by the teachers as a failure and tortured more than anyone else. His only solace is Johan, a partially tame shark he keeps in a sea-pen not far from his cabin. Schulman attempts to use Jonah as a sort a of underpinning for this section of the novel, bringing Jane, Keefer and Jonah together again and again as a sort of touchpoint by which we can measure Jane's change. As Jane slowly decides on success, she becomes able to face her fear of Jonah, and as Keefer sinks into depression and loneliness, he loses touch with fear altogether. Both Jane and Keefer eventually swim with Jonah, Jane falling into the pen accidentally one night and Keefer swimming and wrestling with the shark, finding freedom with his captive just before death.

This is the greatest tragedy of Swimming with Jonah: in Keefer, Schulman creates a character at once interesting and real. He is the most arresting and human character in the book, but Schulman never allows him to develop fully, nor does she really explore Keefer's relationship with Jane. In the end she sacrifices him in a meaningless and predictable suicide in order to bring closure to the book and to propel Jane, a protagonist we can never like to the top.