Elaine Neil Orr

Tacker Hart, former high school football star and would-be architect, has gone to Nigeria on a plum assignment for a private company, only to be summarily dismissed, practically kidnapped, and sent home to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The year is 1959, and momentous change is in the wind, though Tacker doesn’t sense it.

He senses little of anything, feeling adrift and angry and missing Nigeria, a place whose ways and atmosphere swallowed him whole. He’s barely put together that the Black society he admired in Africa would be forced to the back of the bus in his hometown. Moody and distraught, Tacker moves out of his parents’ house, persuades his father to let him manage one of two grocery stores Dad owns, and doesn’t know where he’s going, or why.

Two encounters give him purpose. First, he runs into Kate Monroe, whom he remembers vaguely from high school, and picks up signals of common ground. Second, Tacker defends a Black customer, Gaines Townson, from a beating by several toughs in front of his store — Gaines has crossed an invisible line by shopping there. Subsequently, Tacker hires Gaines to work in the store, not realizing that his new employee has become active in the Civil Rights movement, participating in sit-ins at lunch counters. Nor does Tacker know that Kate, to whom he’s attracted more and more, distrusts the movement and Blacks in general.

Swimming Between Worlds stands out in several significant ways. Orr does a terrific job capturing how adulthood confuses the two prospective romantic partners. They’re both difficult, oversensitive, wary, aching from loneliness, and expert at driving people away. Kate, at least, has a more conventional excuse: Her mother, her sole surviving parent, has died, and Kate lives in her house, with its memories and societal burdens (her parents possessed status and therefore a code to live up to). As part of that legacy, the place contains letters her mother wanted her to burn. Big hint: Kate disobeys and is knocked for a loop.

Kate also has a suitor who’s doing his medical residency, and whom she’s not sure she wants to marry, yet doesn’t see what other choice in life she has. Marrying the doctor would give her social position and security but pigeonhole her as her husband’s reflection. I like how Orr portrays this dilemma while introducing Kate’s growing interest in photography, the pursuit that gives her something of her own, without overplaying it.

As you might surmise, the author shows you her characters’ flaws straight out. You lose patience with Tacker and Kate regularly, and nothing between them goes neatly. For instance, there’s a great scene when the medical resident shows up unexpectedly at a birthday party to which his rival has also been invited. Nor does the author protect her characters in other ways, for they suffer deep losses.

From a moral point of view, essential in a story like this, the sit-ins narrative doesn’t try too hard, just the right touch. Tacker’s no better than he should be, no liberal in hiding. It’s not immediately apparent to him how Blacks endure bigotry as second-class citizens, and how, if they seek ordinary pleasures he takes for granted — sitting down to eat at a lunch counter, for instance — they take their lives in their hands. Kate, too frightened even to contemplate what segregation means, argues with Tacker about it, though she comes around, eventually.

I’m less taken with Gaines’s portrayal. He seems one-dimensional, passionate about the cause and little else, as though he were merely a plot device. Indeed, he brings Tacker messages from the front lines and articles from Black newspapers, all of which prompt action. It’s also curious how easily Tacker, who has a quick temper that often gets him in trouble, tolerates Gaines’s jibes and lets him act as his conscience, his goad.

Then again, Tacker’s characterization in general sometimes feels stilted, particularly toward the beginning. The text often “explains” him, which strikes me as odd, given the care Orr takes with emotional resonance, as with her artful descriptions. Regarding the storytelling, though I like the Nigerian narrative in itself (and am reminded of my years in Africa), both the unnecessary prologue set there and one later section feel shoehorned in.

Still, Swimming Between Worlds is a thought-provoking novel, a human story full of feeling with an unexpected twist or two.… (plus d'informations)

It's 1960, and Tacker Hart, a young architect, has just returned from a year and a half in Nigeria to his home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was there as part of a project to build high schools, and while there he fell in love with local culture. He made Nigerian friends. And he's been sent home in disgrace, for "going native."

Kate Monroe was a high school classmate, but went to Agnes Scott College. Unexpectedly even to herself, she's become a photographer. She has also, after the death of her and her brother Brian's father several years earlier, now nursed her mother through her death from cancer. She's living in the family home--she inherited the house, while Brian inherited "the cabin," and lives there--and trying to find her footing.

She and Tacker each, separately, encounter Gaines, a young African-American man who will have a significant impact on them both.

Tacker is currently managing the family grocery store, and he hires Gaines as store staff. Gaines walks home past Kate's home, and she's alarmed because, well, black people are scary to her. It's 1960, and the lunch counter sit-ins are about to start, and Gaines is going to be actively involved.

After a year and a half in Nigeria, Tacker already sees his home, and black-white relations, differently. Gaines opens his eyes even further. And when Kate starts shopping regularly in the old, familiar Hart's Grocery again, she and Tacker start to affect each other.

Tacker needs to find his way back to architecture. Kate needs to find her footing and her confidence as a photographer, in a time when women with independent careers are still not fully accepted. Gaines' challenges, while by far the most daunting, are in some ways the least complicated, at least in that he's not at all conflicted about his goals. He also, of course, has the most realistic grasp, of the three, of what he's trying to do.

We get some significant flashbacks to Nigeria, as we learn what Tacker experienced and learned. We get fewer, but still significant, flashbacks for Kate.

Gaines is the one we have to learn to understand almost entirely from the outside, and that feels right. As the only African-American among the three significant characters, he's the least accessible to the other two, in 1960 Winston-Salem, with the greatest need for self-protection.

I took several breaks while reading this, to absorb what I was reading, but it was well worth it. I was a child in New England when the events behind this novel were happening, and it's an alien piece of history for me.

Recommended.

I received a free electronic galley from the publisher via NetGalley.… (plus d'informations)

Thanks to Book Club CookBook and Berkley.

At first, I was like let's move on this book so I can finish it but then more than half way through I started enjoying it. I love the 1950's setting. It was segregation when "colored" people were not welcome anywhere. Tacker comes back from Nigeria to run his father's store. He falls in love with Kate who finally comes into her own and becomes a photographer. One saying that she kept on using and it was definitely overused was "cold lozenge in my heart" and it drove me nuts.

Tacker finally goes into architecture but not before asking himself if he wants to do so since he's building a bathhouse in a segregated pool (hence the cover of the book which I loved).

I'm not going to spoil the ending but let's just I cried like a baby.… (plus d'informations)