Swift River: Decent Debut

 

 

 

 

Swift River (2024)

By Essie Chambers

Simon & Shuster, 304 pages.

★★★

 

Swift River, the debut novel from Essie Chambers, is sure to be a crowd pleaser. Chambers has a great story to tell, even though her novel suffers from a common problem of new writers in trying to do too much and thereby shortchanging readers on the detail needed to clarify.

 

Hers is an intergenerational tale set in 1980, 1987, and 1915. Though the novel goes back and forth in time, Chambers often plays loose with time periods. At its center is nine- then sixteen-year-old Diamond Newberry. When her father Rob(ert) vanishes when she is nine, she is left as the only biracial person in Swift River. The only clues to Rob’s disappearance is that was accused of theft and left his wallet, license, a seed packet, a grocery list, and his shoes by the riverbank. Did he commit suicide out of shame? Diamond’s white mother, Anna, assumes so, though Diamond has dreams that he’s alive and has an entirely new family nearby.

 

Those in Western Massachusetts know Swift River as a short (32 miles) tributary of the Ware River known for trout fishing. Chambers appropriates the name for both the river and her small town. Given Chambers’ local connections, one could play guessing games. Dalton? Cummington? Goshen? Stop. Chambers spent much of her youth in Greenfield and is an Amherst High alum, even if her Swift River feels like an amalgam of Berkshires hilltowns. Anna suffered unspoken ostracism for marrying Rob and when he is gone, she goes into a downward spiral of unemployment and delusion. As for Diamond, she’s way smarter than most of her peers and doesn’t really think of herself as unusual until she hits her teen years. About all she knows of blackness is from TV characters such as Thlema Evans (“Good Times) and Wezzy (“The Jeffersons”).

 

By the time she’s 16, she can no longer ride her bicycle as, at nearly 300 pounds, she’s grossly obese. She’s also aware of her ramshackle home, trips to Goodwill for clothing, and long walks as her mother has a car but doesn’t drive. Chambers relates these matters, as well as Anna’s grandiose expectations associated with collecting Rob’s life insurance policy should he be declared legally dead, with poignancy mixed with humor. Some may wonder if they lend themselves to chuckles. Diamond finds herself with few friends other than “Fat Betty,” the local librarian and Shelley, an unorthodox white peer.

 

The first part of Swift River reads like a narrative peppered with memories, but the novel’s revelations come in the form of an epistolary novel (one told through letters). Diamond discovers a lot about why Swift River is so white via correspondence with her Aunt Lena, an Atlanta nurse. Even much of those come back to Diamond third hand via letters from Clara, Lena’s mother. Call Clara the 1915 part of the novel. This is how Diamond learns about “The Leaving,” when African Americans left Swift River en masse. Chambers turns usual narratives of black history upside down. The Great Migration (circa 1910-70) is the name given to black flight from the South to the North, but this Leaving is a flight in the opposite direction. So too is the notion of a “sundown” town, a warning to blacks not to be on the street after dark. In all of New England, only Groton, Massachusetts, and Darien, Connecticut, were ever considered sundown towns.

 

It's not entirely clear why Chambers pulled this switcheroo. It’s possible that she wanted to contrast Diamond’s unfolding racial awareness by juxtaposing it against her childhood naiveté, or that by the 1980s the promise of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was unraveling. Either way, though, a deeper explanation is needed, especially given that Clara did not leave Swift River. Clara is underdrawn and comes off as more of a device than a fully realized character.

 

Diamond, though, is so memorable that I think many readers will overlook the holes in the narrative. It still baffles me, though, why Chambers made her obese. What we are to think of that attribute? Does she just happen to be fat or is she being fat shamed? I sincerely doubt Chambers was aiming at the latter, but she leaves us with an open-ended coming of age story.

 

Rob Weir