Swimming home : a novel / Deborah Levy ; with an introduction by Tom McCarthy.

"First published in Great Britain by And Other Stories in 2011"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

A QUESTION for the wives: Let's say you've rented a holiday villa on the French Riviera, and when you arrive, along with your philandering, middle-aged poet husband, you discover an attractive young woman, her fingernails painted green, floating naked in the pool. Mightn't it be a good idea for everyone concerned to ask the rental agent if you can still retrieve your deposit? Unfortunately for the characters, and luckily for the reader, the wife who has leased the vacation house in "Swimming Home" doesn't appear to think so. From the first brief chapters of Deborah Levy's spare, disturbing and frequently funny novel, which was a finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize, we sense that things will turn out badly - for the nude interloper as well as for the villa guests. We can predict with some certainty that two marriages will be tested, possibly ruined, and that the antique Persian gun will not stay hidden under the bed. But what we don't understand for a while is what sort of novel we're reading. As we begin to settle in among the party of privileged British vacationers - two couples, one with a teenage daughter, all warily eyeing Kitty Finch, the girl who emerges from the pool - we may wonder. Haven't we seen something like this in an early Chabrol thriller or in that Ozon film with Charlotte Rampling? Don't the tone and the milieu suggest an improbable hybrid of Virginia Woolf, Edward St. Aubyn, "Absolutely Fabulous" and Patricia Highsmith? As we continue reading, we realize that "Swimming Home" is unlike anything but itself. Its originality lies in its ellipses, its patterns and repetitions, in what it discloses and reveals, and in the peculiar curio cabinet Levy has constructed: a collection of objects and details that disclose more about these fictional men and women than they are willing, or able, to tell us about themselves.