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Swim for the Little One First
Swim for the Little One First is a dazzling new collection of twelve short fictions by the acclaimed fiction writer and prose stylist Noy Holland. The stories gathered in Swim for the Little One First vary in setting (Ecuador, Montana, Florida, the Berkshires, North Dakota, New Mexico, and California) and style (from the plainspoken to the fustian).
In “Milk River” a young girl whose mother has committed suicide and whose brother has gone off to war is left to tend to her ailing father; in “Today is an Early Out” a family finds itself caught in a mudslide in the Sierra Nevada; in “Merengue” a young couple takes up residence in a HUD hotel in Miami Beach, among the elderly living out their last days. In the title story a woman with young children addresses her father, who has come to visit, in theobdurate language of remorse. In “Pemmican” the author takes a comic approach to the telling of an absurd story about escaped pet mice surviving winter in a car. In these and seven other stories, Noy Holland, an author praised by writers and critics ranging from William H. Gass to Michiko Kakutani, presents readers with what Gass has described as “beautifully lyrical but bitter prose and . . . an ardent grimness of eye that is both unsettling and intensely satisfying.”
In “Milk River” a young girl whose mother has committed suicide and whose brother has gone off to war is left to tend to her ailing father; in “Today is an Early Out” a family finds itself caught in a mudslide in the Sierra Nevada; in “Merengue” a young couple takes up residence in a HUD hotel in Miami Beach, among the elderly living out their last days. In the title story a woman with young children addresses her father, who has come to visit, in theobdurate language of remorse. In “Pemmican” the author takes a comic approach to the telling of an absurd story about escaped pet mice surviving winter in a car. In these and seven other stories, Noy Holland, an author praised by writers and critics ranging from William H. Gass to Michiko Kakutani, presents readers with what Gass has described as “beautifully lyrical but bitter prose and . . . an ardent grimness of eye that is both unsettling and intensely satisfying.”
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
184 pages, Paperback
First published September 6, 2012
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346 people want to read
About the author
Noy Holland
12 books51 followersNoy Holland’s latest work is I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like: New and Selected Stories, out now from Counterpoint Press. Noy's debut novel, Bird, came out in 2015. Other collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First (FC2), What Begins with Bird (FC2), and The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf). She has published work in The Kenyon Review, Antioch, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, and New York Tyrant, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, as well as at Phillips Andover and the University of Florida. She serves on the board of directors at Fiction Collective Two.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 11, 2014
Holland writes stories about people in simple sentences. She writes about what they do and where they live, places often impoverished and rural. These characters are not usually given to introspection, nor does the narrator offer explanation, leaving it to a carefully chosen complex of details. In “pachysandra,” we meet Rose who “broke a finger dialing the telephone.” She “kept TVs on in every room” and “a big rusting freezer in the basement stuffed with meatloaf and frozen lettuce.” The plots in this collection are as ephemeral as the passage of a routine, a day, or a life. They build around themes that do not shy away from episodes of failures, little ones and major ones. Yet we find triumphs of love and spirit in the brokenness.
Two very short stories that tug at the heart with these small victories are “love’s thousand bees” about an encounter between a destitute boy and a school girl during her recess and “jericho” whose mother abandoned him to the care of the old señora. The protagonists are both small blind boys, perhaps blind to their circumstances.
The strong rhythm of the longer "Merengue," aptly titled, carries the reader through a series of gloomy episodes in wonderment at how this young couple who lives with old men in a rundown hotel goes on in spite of cruelties and deprivations. Sometimes the characters in other stories do not make it.
What impresses me about Holland’s writing is that she reminds us pointblank how close we are to a capricious and tough fate which is sometimes dramatic in its blows but more often is invisible, creeping up on us incrementally through days and years. These stories do not deny hard realities.
Two very short stories that tug at the heart with these small victories are “love’s thousand bees” about an encounter between a destitute boy and a school girl during her recess and “jericho” whose mother abandoned him to the care of the old señora. The protagonists are both small blind boys, perhaps blind to their circumstances.
The strong rhythm of the longer "Merengue," aptly titled, carries the reader through a series of gloomy episodes in wonderment at how this young couple who lives with old men in a rundown hotel goes on in spite of cruelties and deprivations. Sometimes the characters in other stories do not make it.
What impresses me about Holland’s writing is that she reminds us pointblank how close we are to a capricious and tough fate which is sometimes dramatic in its blows but more often is invisible, creeping up on us incrementally through days and years. These stories do not deny hard realities.
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June 11, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/17/r...
Review by Daniel Green
The influence of Gordon Lish as teacher and editor on numerous American writers is well known (more so than his own fiction). Although this influence has extended to a wide range of writers, from Raymond Carver to Harold Brodkey, one group of currently notable writers seems to be especially sensitive to Lish’s influence. Writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and Noy Holland palpably employ, in somewhat different but observable ways, the strategy Lish calls “consecution,” the focus on constructing and linking sentences by considering sound and rhythm as well as sense. Indeed, these writers no doubt take the strategy farther than Lish himself ever intended, resulting in short stories (all but Schutt work almost exclusively in the short story, but her best work may also be her short fiction) using a mode of composition that produces an alternate principle of structure and form through which “character” and “story” are not abandoned but emerge as the afterthought of the movement of language, the characters and plots subordinated to the autonomy of that movement.
From this shared commitment to more fully exploring the linguistic resources of the sentence as a literary device, each of these writers draws on those resources in their own way, with different stylistic signatures that also create divergent larger-scale formal effects. Although all four writers work in narrative fragments, Williams’s stories are both the most highly compressed and the most elliptical. Her brief fictions especially require very close attention to the materiality of their sentences (including their sound), each one of which might be an episode in itself, the interval between them a leap in time or place. The same is true of Lutz’s early work, although more recently his stories have gotten longer, even if Lutz’s own sentences are more notable for their utterly singular wordplay than for advancing clearly discernible plots. Lutz is perhaps the writer among this group who has most intensively developed the strategy of consecution taken from Lish and, in fact, has developed it well beyond what Lish could have had in mind, while Christine Schutt might be described as the most “lyrical” prose stylist (although her prose is ultimately not so conventional in its carefully cadenced lyricism, which in its way is as sensitive to the intricacies of sound and syntax as Lutz’s more unpredictable sentences). Schutt’s novels in particular come closest to fulfilling traditional expectations of plot and character, but the reader who approaches her fiction simply for its narrative interest and who fails to appreciate what Lutz, in his essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” calls the “page hugging” appeal of Schutt’s writing will surely miss out on a significant element of its achievement and appeal.
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/17/r...
Review by Daniel Green
The influence of Gordon Lish as teacher and editor on numerous American writers is well known (more so than his own fiction). Although this influence has extended to a wide range of writers, from Raymond Carver to Harold Brodkey, one group of currently notable writers seems to be especially sensitive to Lish’s influence. Writers such as Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and Noy Holland palpably employ, in somewhat different but observable ways, the strategy Lish calls “consecution,” the focus on constructing and linking sentences by considering sound and rhythm as well as sense. Indeed, these writers no doubt take the strategy farther than Lish himself ever intended, resulting in short stories (all but Schutt work almost exclusively in the short story, but her best work may also be her short fiction) using a mode of composition that produces an alternate principle of structure and form through which “character” and “story” are not abandoned but emerge as the afterthought of the movement of language, the characters and plots subordinated to the autonomy of that movement.
From this shared commitment to more fully exploring the linguistic resources of the sentence as a literary device, each of these writers draws on those resources in their own way, with different stylistic signatures that also create divergent larger-scale formal effects. Although all four writers work in narrative fragments, Williams’s stories are both the most highly compressed and the most elliptical. Her brief fictions especially require very close attention to the materiality of their sentences (including their sound), each one of which might be an episode in itself, the interval between them a leap in time or place. The same is true of Lutz’s early work, although more recently his stories have gotten longer, even if Lutz’s own sentences are more notable for their utterly singular wordplay than for advancing clearly discernible plots. Lutz is perhaps the writer among this group who has most intensively developed the strategy of consecution taken from Lish and, in fact, has developed it well beyond what Lish could have had in mind, while Christine Schutt might be described as the most “lyrical” prose stylist (although her prose is ultimately not so conventional in its carefully cadenced lyricism, which in its way is as sensitive to the intricacies of sound and syntax as Lutz’s more unpredictable sentences). Schutt’s novels in particular come closest to fulfilling traditional expectations of plot and character, but the reader who approaches her fiction simply for its narrative interest and who fails to appreciate what Lutz, in his essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” calls the “page hugging” appeal of Schutt’s writing will surely miss out on a significant element of its achievement and appeal.
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2012/12/17/r...
March 16, 2017
As is usually the case, I'm sure my rating will drop to 4 stars with enough time. At the time of this "review", however, I can't overstate how much this collection stirred my imagination and caused me to reevaluate the nature and function of style. Ms. Holland deftly conveys just how much an innovative aesthetic can enhance atypical stories and charge them with a metric ton of goddamn feeling.
Of all the stories, "Merengue" and "Blood Country" affected me the most -- the former due to its examination of isolation and regret, and the latter for its emotional juxtaposition of entropy and regeneration. The stories may not be universally strong, but that's beside the point; as I said before, this is a collection that has the power to challenge your preconceived notions about the genre of short fiction.
Of all the stories, "Merengue" and "Blood Country" affected me the most -- the former due to its examination of isolation and regret, and the latter for its emotional juxtaposition of entropy and regeneration. The stories may not be universally strong, but that's beside the point; as I said before, this is a collection that has the power to challenge your preconceived notions about the genre of short fiction.
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April 19, 2021no rating because i don't rate books i have to read for classes but some pieces i was definitely drawn to over others. overall a solid collection but as someone who doesn't reach for this on my own i'm not in love or anything
August 31, 2022
I enjoyed some of the stories in this book and give it a 3.5/5. I especially liked the story “today is an early out”.
April 12, 2013
from NOÖ [14]:
Read this before falling asleep a lot, which was perfect for the melting latticework of Holland’s stories. I want to talk about the sentences in terms of Latinate school subject words—their geography, their anthropology, their topography—but I know I can’t because these sentences sew their tricks from much more lived-in registers. Bought this after I watched Holland read the story “Milk River” and it made me cry. The story is about two girls with brothers at war and fathers sick-headed and dogs dogged and mothers dead. This book is about mixing the dust of the plains and the dust of the desert and how sometimes you can’t hear what’s flown.
Read this before falling asleep a lot, which was perfect for the melting latticework of Holland’s stories. I want to talk about the sentences in terms of Latinate school subject words—their geography, their anthropology, their topography—but I know I can’t because these sentences sew their tricks from much more lived-in registers. Bought this after I watched Holland read the story “Milk River” and it made me cry. The story is about two girls with brothers at war and fathers sick-headed and dogs dogged and mothers dead. This book is about mixing the dust of the plains and the dust of the desert and how sometimes you can’t hear what’s flown.
December 10, 2014
"Luckies Like Us" just about killed me. So smartly, deftly, beautifully written, and a devastating narrative. The way she handles language, the way she manages sound and ambiguity, is stunning. In those respects it's like reading poetry. There is also so much heartbreak here. Like reading Raymond Carver, a bit. But most often I am floored by the sentences, and the intense actions that are happening.
"She went by feel, not watching, and dabbed the milk at Maggie's breast. She held a kitten to her, let it root and mew. Their breasts had puffed up, -- just enough, and the buds were like satin, and the kittens latched softly on."
"She went by feel, not watching, and dabbed the milk at Maggie's breast. She held a kitten to her, let it root and mew. Their breasts had puffed up, -- just enough, and the buds were like satin, and the kittens latched softly on."
July 16, 2013
Devastating, in it's reach into the human heart, and it's ability to make me chuckle. Thank you, Noy Holland. Can't wait - as with all her books - to retread this book, these sentences.
July 20, 2016
stories that are almost poems, touched with remorse and sadness but still vibrant, powerful.
and very beautiful.
and very beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews