Swimming Home reminded me of both The White Hotel and The Magus, though it's much leaner than either; what it has in common with them is how much it seems to be about what's below the surface, driven by the unconscious. From its opening scene - which turns out later to be pivotal (as one might expect - but not in the way one might assume) as well as slipperily elided - it feels unstable, troubling, on the verge of sinister, in the way that desires and drives in the psychoanalytic sense can be when glimpsed. Hot Milk is the more sophisticated and deeper book, but this one (from 2011) has its way too. Kitty Finch, Joe Jacobs, his daughter Nina et al.
