Aquamarine Paperback – 10 Jun. 1993

This is a brilliantly written and observed novel with a clever structure familiar to anyone whose seen films like "Sliding Doors."We've all speculated about the lives we've never lived, about choices that we made and avoided. This novel confronts those ideas with a clever structure and different angles on the same set of characters. It's also very funny in parts, with good dialogue and entirely believable people.I rarely give anything five stars - this book deserves them all - highly recommended.

Quite simply the most skilfully written and enjoyable book ever. I don't think she will ever surpass it because it is perfect. Everytime I come back to it I find stuff I missed before and it is always even funnier than I remember. It is the "sliding doors" scenario in its purest form. It's actually like a lyric poem. If I could learn it and recite it, I would!

To say that the "overcalculated structure" [of this book] "soon wears thin" is complete guff. The structure is simplicity itself and entirely effective. Also, Jesse does not look over at Marty on the starting blocks and know that she (Jesse) is going to lose; Jesse knows that she may let Marty win. Big difference. This book is like a long lyrical poem (though I know that's a contradiction in terms). I wish I could learn it all and recite it. The characters are fallible but the book is perfect.

Carol Anshaw's first novel opens with a strikingly beautiful description of an Olympic swimming final. Jesse (I'm not sure why her name is spelt in this masculine way, rather than the more usual 'Jessie' or 'Jessye'), a girl from small-town Missouri, is hotly tipped to win a gold medal. But - at the last minute - she loses out by a whisker's breadth to Australian Marty, a young woman who Jesse has fallen in love with in the preparations for the race. She takes silver while Marty takes the gold. These few pages are remarkable for their wonderful descriptions of the act of swimming, for their evocations of colour and for Anshaw's brilliant depiction of what it might be like to come so close to - but not quite close enough to - a cherished goal.But I'm afraid for me it was downhill all the way from there. What happens next is that Jesse's story splits into three possible 'futures' 20 or so years after the Olympics. In the first story Jesse has returned to her deeply boring home town of 'New Jerusalem' (oh novelistic irony!) Missouri, where she sells real estate, helps to care for her handicapped brother, is married to a sturdy bar-owner named Neil, and is preparing for the birth of her first child - while indulging in an affair with a drifter and 'skywriter' named Wayne. In the second story, Jesse has taken up her own English-teacher mother's interest in English literature and become a literature lecturer in New York, where she is enjoying a fairly happy affair with another woman. The two make a journey from New York to Missouri for Jesse's mother's birthday, where Jesse agrees to perform a major act of kindness for her mother - and also realizes that there's more to her lover than meets the eye. In the third story, Jesse is a divorced single mom, running a ramshackle swimming training centre in Florida, coping with rearing two adolescents alone, with occasional visits from her selfish ex-husband and with her son's reluctance to take any reasonable employment, and sustained only by her love affair with a kindly local; but can she commit to him? All three Jesses have very different lives, but they have one thing in common - they are still obsessed with Marty and that famous swimming competition. The (very short) novel ends with one of the Jesses - but which one? - eventually travelling to Australia to confront Marty (now a glamorous TV host) and find out what their brief relationship really meant to the Australian.I'm afraid I didn't enjoy this book at all. I found the writing style after the first section drab, and most of the characters irritating. The first Jesse's life screamed small-town claustrophobia, and her behaviour seemed pretty stupid (Wayne was clearly a dead loss as a lover, and I couldn't see why she got a kick out of cheating on poor, worthy Neil). There were copious descriptions of unappetizing meals (a lot of Jell-O gets eaten in this book, ditto fast food) and much low-level gossip - by the time I lurched onto Part II I was in a trance of boredom. The second Jesse was potentially more interesting, but Anshaw makes little of how she has managed to leap from Olympic swimmer to heavy(ish) weight academic and doesn't do enough to contrast Jesse's New York life with her background in Missouri. Again, there's much stifling small-town claustrophobia (including another unpleasant man, this time Jesse's mom's fiance, and much eating of Jell-O) when Jesse goes back to Missouri. The third section was marginally more interesting - there was one lovely scene where Jesse meditated on her difficult relationship with her son, and how he refused to do the one thing that would really please her - but again I found most of the characters pretty bland, and Jesse's defeatist, non-commital attitude rather depressing. I found the end rather predictable - a typical modernist (or postmodern?) assumption that one 'can never know the truth'. Nor did I understand why Jesse felt so defeated at being an Olympic Silver Medallist - it's hardly a great badge of shame, especially as she and Marty were neck and neck competitors. Would she really have chucked it all in just because she didn't make Gold that one time? And would an Olympic contestant (who would have certainly won quite substantial sums for getting so far) really end up in such comparative poverty as Jesse I and Jesse III did? Although I could understand Jesse's grief if she felt Marty had betrayed her, I honestly couldn't see in terms of her swimming career what she was making such a fuss about.I have read other 'what if?' novels that play with alternative developments in people's lives, and enjoyed them, but in this one I found the drab settings, rather flimsy characters and depressed heroine a real hindrance to enjoying the book. I have two others of Anshaw's novels, and will read them, but I certainly won't be revisiting this one - I felt it was a book where a self-consciously clever style took too much precedence over substance.