In ‘Drowning Practice,’ a Dreamlike Vision of the End of the World

DROWNING PRACTICE
By Mike Meginnis

“Drowning Follow” is a e book a couple of dream, and it reads like a dream too: melancholy and luminous, looping and discursive, proof against simple interpretation.

The premise of the novel — Mike Meginnis’s second, after “Fats Man and Little Boy” — is straightforward and unusual: One night time, each individual on earth has the identical dream that on Nov. 1 there will probably be a flood that drowns every little thing and everybody. Afterward, there are “just a few optimists, agnostics and well-meaning liars” who attempt to shrug off the imaginative and prescient, however for essentially the most half, of us begin preparing for the top.

Devotees of apocalypse fiction must be warned that “Drowning Follow” shouldn’t be a story of daring heroes banding collectively to save lots of the day, neither is it a meticulously rendered portrait of civilizational collapse (although Meginnis does discover moments for intelligent glimpses of end-times America: tiger dad and mom who insist on dropping their children off for faculty within the fall; ads braying “YOU HAVE JUST 33 DAYS TO REFINANCE YOUR MORTGAGE”; and so forth.). The e book’s consideration is much less on the top of the world and extra on the top of 1 specific household: a depressive novelist named Lyd; her self-pitying narcissist ex-husband, David; and their good and delicate 13-year-old daughter, Mott.

As the top begins, Lyd rouses herself to motion. She has spent years in isolation in her D.C.-area residence following the dissolution of her profession and marriage. Now she pulls Mott from faculty, the place the instructor is a checked-out mess and Mott is doing the educating, and takes her on a highway journey. Lyd would really like her child to see a bit extra of the world earlier than it’s gone, however principally she needs to get away from her ex-husband. David, as paranoid as he’s controlling, has by no means let go of their relationship, conniving to rent Lyd as his typist so he can maintain her below pseudo-surveillance, as he had apparently accomplished by all their years collectively. David is amongst those that deny the understanding of the approaching apocalypse, and he’s decided to place his fractured household again collectively. It’s time, he tells Lyd coldly, for them to finish “this complete divorce experiment.”

The novel’s perspective rotates amongst Lyd, David and Mott, and Mott’s sections are typically essentially the most charming. Not like her dad and mom, each of whom had been deeply broken lengthy earlier than the apocalypse started, Mott is charming and curious, full of affection for a world that’s crumbling beneath her. She is, nevertheless, so obsessed together with her fragile fiction-writer mom that she, too, is writing a e book, hers a couple of mom and daughter who swap our bodies. This book-within-a-book can be dreamy and about goals: “The mom dreamed of birthing herself — rising from her personal physique, extracted by the physician — and the daughter dreamed of abandoning her child physique to remain within the womb, the place she was heat and protected.”

As the times march solemnly towards November, Mott works on her novel; Lyd struggles together with her sobriety; and so they each disguise from David. In the meantime, David sits at his pc in Virginia, doing medicine and conducting surveillance for an unnamed authorities company investigating the character of the November prophecy.

Typically, Meginnis appears much less all for what individuals do throughout an apocalypse than in what it looks like to stay throughout an apocalypse: the way it feels for Lyd as impending dying compounds her present traumas; the way it feels for Mott as she makes an attempt to reconcile her love for her dad together with her mom’s resentment of him. David’s emotions are right here too, as uncomfortable as they’re — the obsessiveness, his urge to cruelty, his deepening narcissism and paranoia.

The plot meanders, not a lot choosing up velocity as packing on new, bizarre tales alongside the best way. David pretends to be a therapist so he can acquire and report the goals of legislation enforcement officers; Mott befriends a troubled 20-something named Meredith, who has her personal darkish tales from the previous; David hires an actor to fake to be him and go on TV looking for info on his lacking household. Tales-within-stories come and go, not all the time with any clear decision or goal, whereas the central narrative query — will David catch as much as Lyd and Mott? — resolves all of the sudden and with an odd sense of anticlimax. If this all seems like the best way tales work not in novels however in goals, my robust suspicion is that that is no coincidence.

What retains the novel grounded by all of it is younger Mott. Readers will root for her: to complete writing a e book, to complete studying a e book — she checks out “Little Ladies” within the opening chapter and carries it round for her complete journey — and perhaps even to get to complete her life. “Drowning Follow” usually looks like a parable of unfulfillment, and Mott is our hope, our likelihood, our dream of the longer term.

After which Nov. 1 arrives. Among the strongest writing in “Drowning Follow” comes within the e book’s mesmerizing ultimate pages, a charged evocation of temper by the plain description of easy issues: “all the garments that nobody needed,” “all of the espresso rings on stiff paper towels,” “useless batteries in a disposable bowl.” And to the final, it’s the elusive method of goals that holds sway.

“Drowning Follow” is actually gradual in elements, and a few of its quirkier tangents may need been excised or reshaped to raised serve the central narrative. However like a dream, it follows its personal logic, and like many goals, it has stayed with me within the waking hours since I emerged.