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Swimming with Jonah
Swimming with Jonah
Jane Guy, the awkward, insecure daughter of a world-renowned physician and a beautiful ballerina, has come to a tiny Indonesian island to attend Queen's Medical School--an institution that will accept, for an exorbitant fee, any American child of privilege despite his or her previous academic history. Surrounded by jungle and water, Jane is immediately plunged into unrelenting heat and the psychological abuse of the teaching staff. The truest connection she makes on the island is with Keefer, a sensitive fellow student who keeps a shark he has named Jonah captive in an ocean pen. But as days extend into weeks, Jane Guy feels herself changing, retreating into a body and spirit she can no longer recognize. And as an aura of desperation deepens among her peers, Jane's determination to succeed grows. Because failure is the only way off the island, and for Jane, it is not an option.
- GenresLiterary Fiction
272 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1999
60 people want to read
About the author
Audrey Schulman
11 books88 followersAudrey Schulman is the author of three previous novels: Swimming With Jonah, The Cage, and A House Named Brazil. Her work has been translated into eleven languages. Born in Montreal, Schulman now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
October 25, 2015
Four stars because I couldn't put it down and I appreciated the artistry; one star because it was ugly; for a final grade of two stars. Swimming with Jonah is one of the most sinister, creepy and emotionally manipulative books I have read in a long time. I'm not sure what Schulman was trying to accomplish here but if her goal was to horrify and mesmerize, she succeeded with me, at least partially. But I never completely bought the premise nor was I emotionally engaged with the book's many and mostly repellent characters. In the book's final pages the ambiguous ending left me puzzled but so detached that my only reaction was to notice an annoying plot hole
The basic premise: Take a bunch of super-entitled, psychologically damaged, hyper-rich kids whose privileged, driven moms and dads buy them a place at a sort of medical school/boot camp located on an isolated island in Indonesia. Add sadistic professors who are going to whip these kids into shape and force feed them info on the difference between fibroblasts and fibrocytes and how to remember all names of all the bones in the human foot. Plus about 800,000 other terms and concepts, mostly in Latin and Greek.
Then there are the natives, whose utility consists of being the cleaning crew tidying up after the students, and regularly dying and providing corpses for aforementioned students to dissect. Each student gets his or her own corpse to dissect, a new one each semester--necessary since this is the tropics and there is no air-conditioning.
There's nothing for the kiddies to do except study--all in a giant library with monitors and tutors available 24/7. But they find ways to amuse themselves in their short breaks--mostly drinking, hooking up in appropriately clinical fashion, and occasionally staging ugly pranks with dead body parts. One of the odder students (though they are all round the twist) gets his jollies and releases a little tension by keeping a grown shark in a homemade ocean pen. He names the shark Jonah because it has a smile like the kid's father. Another chap is into sado-masochistic sex and carving up his corpse in disgusting ways. A third, the semi-normal protagonist, Jane Guy, is just an overweight mediocrity who thinks she can't keep a fact in her brain for five minutes and who has been pushed by overbearing parents into a career for which she is probably ill-suited.
You get the idea. Normally this is the sort of thing I would have dropped like a live tarantula. But I confess I was sucked in...hypnotized by Schulman's undoubted gift for language; for sentences that glitter with evil, shine with bodily secretions (mostly sweat), and glisten with chemical concoctions (mostly formalin). Plus she knows how to move a plot along and hint that something really bad is going to happen, giving just enough clues that this reader at least was dying to know what would happen in the end. . And by the very end I didn't care; it all felt like an anti-climax.
Okay. So here are some theories on what Audrey Schulman might have been trying to accomplish:
1.Perhaps this was a study of humans under intense pressure. Humans placed in a vicious, completely alien environment where the winner takes all and the losers (generally chosen at random) are verbally and physically harassed; and all are pushed to their physical and mental limits. Think The Hunger Games meets Survivor meets a dumbed-down version of Heart of Darkness.
2. It may also have been about the exploitative, dysfunctional way in which we Americans 'train' our physicians and how we select the supposed 'winners'. Are American medical schools this bad? It does seem that the process is far more brutal than it needs to be and accomplishes little beyond creating a cadre of professionals who believe they are so much smarter than their patients that they forget how to listen and who are so deeply in debt that they can't do anything other than charge top dollar. Alas, Schulman's exaggerated picture is so emotionally overwrought that it undercuts any serious argument she may be making.
It's also implausible. Since each student who made it though the island boot camp's four year program was worth over $300,000 in revenue, the pure sadism of the school and the forced high-drop-out rate made little business sense. Big plot hole, IMO.
3. She scores quite a few hits about the children of the super-rich--many completely on-target. I went to an upscale private school in Manhattan and I know the various ways in which too much money and too much insulation from the real world can warp kids. In my sister's particularly dysfunctional class there was the daughter of two psychiatrists who for years thought she was a horse; everyone let her wander the corridors on all fours. No problem. Self expression and all that. Then there was the daughter of hyper-wealthy Wall Street types who had her own floor-through Park Avenue apartment from which she ran an upscale drug and prostitution business. Quite the budding entrepreneur. Schulman's island is full of warped young people like that and it's not a pretty sight.
Maybe they might all benefit from boot camp....Is that Schulman's point? Or is she saying they would have been better off without the all the money and privilege? Well that's probably true, too and it's one of the reasons I support more steeply progressive, higher marginal tax rates (but I digress....) Still, plenty of sane parents with wealth know how to set limits for their kids and manage to raise children who are not monsters.
4. Maybe she was just doing an extended essay on the wonders of nature and the human body. This is the one thing she does incredibly well. The many, many scenes of dissection are brilliant; bodies, even dead ones, are miraculous. Jane Guy's growing sense of the wonder of her own body, and of the strange mysteries unveiled in her dissections are powerfully written.
5. A coming of age novel? Sort of okay. Jane's mind is interesting to inhabit and her out-of-body exam and study experiences took me back to some of my more grueling graduate and post-graduate moments. I loved it when Jane finally learns how to learn and, against all odds, begins to rise to the top of her class. But Jane's decisions in the last third of the book are so morally ambiguous and unsympathetic that I couldn't give her a rousing cheer at the close. Pretty much everyone else was so loathsome and self-destructive that I longed for the whole place and its inhabitants to vanish in a volcanic eruption. No such luck.
Content rating R. Sensitive souls should treat this one like toxic waste.
Fortunately I found a lovely, inspirational Elizabeth Goudge story The Scent of Water to expunge most of this from my memory banks. And once I click save on this review I plan to read a few more good clean reads to erase any mental bots and malicious malware that Audrey Schulman might have installed on my brain.
The basic premise: Take a bunch of super-entitled, psychologically damaged, hyper-rich kids whose privileged, driven moms and dads buy them a place at a sort of medical school/boot camp located on an isolated island in Indonesia. Add sadistic professors who are going to whip these kids into shape and force feed them info on the difference between fibroblasts and fibrocytes and how to remember all names of all the bones in the human foot. Plus about 800,000 other terms and concepts, mostly in Latin and Greek.
Then there are the natives, whose utility consists of being the cleaning crew tidying up after the students, and regularly dying and providing corpses for aforementioned students to dissect. Each student gets his or her own corpse to dissect, a new one each semester--necessary since this is the tropics and there is no air-conditioning.
There's nothing for the kiddies to do except study--all in a giant library with monitors and tutors available 24/7. But they find ways to amuse themselves in their short breaks--mostly drinking, hooking up in appropriately clinical fashion, and occasionally staging ugly pranks with dead body parts. One of the odder students (though they are all round the twist) gets his jollies and releases a little tension by keeping a grown shark in a homemade ocean pen. He names the shark Jonah because it has a smile like the kid's father. Another chap is into sado-masochistic sex and carving up his corpse in disgusting ways. A third, the semi-normal protagonist, Jane Guy, is just an overweight mediocrity who thinks she can't keep a fact in her brain for five minutes and who has been pushed by overbearing parents into a career for which she is probably ill-suited.
You get the idea. Normally this is the sort of thing I would have dropped like a live tarantula. But I confess I was sucked in...hypnotized by Schulman's undoubted gift for language; for sentences that glitter with evil, shine with bodily secretions (mostly sweat), and glisten with chemical concoctions (mostly formalin). Plus she knows how to move a plot along and hint that something really bad is going to happen, giving just enough clues that this reader at least was dying to know what would happen in the end. . And by the very end I didn't care; it all felt like an anti-climax.
Okay. So here are some theories on what Audrey Schulman might have been trying to accomplish:
1.Perhaps this was a study of humans under intense pressure. Humans placed in a vicious, completely alien environment where the winner takes all and the losers (generally chosen at random) are verbally and physically harassed; and all are pushed to their physical and mental limits. Think The Hunger Games meets Survivor meets a dumbed-down version of Heart of Darkness.
2. It may also have been about the exploitative, dysfunctional way in which we Americans 'train' our physicians and how we select the supposed 'winners'. Are American medical schools this bad? It does seem that the process is far more brutal than it needs to be and accomplishes little beyond creating a cadre of professionals who believe they are so much smarter than their patients that they forget how to listen and who are so deeply in debt that they can't do anything other than charge top dollar. Alas, Schulman's exaggerated picture is so emotionally overwrought that it undercuts any serious argument she may be making.
It's also implausible. Since each student who made it though the island boot camp's four year program was worth over $300,000 in revenue, the pure sadism of the school and the forced high-drop-out rate made little business sense. Big plot hole, IMO.
3. She scores quite a few hits about the children of the super-rich--many completely on-target. I went to an upscale private school in Manhattan and I know the various ways in which too much money and too much insulation from the real world can warp kids. In my sister's particularly dysfunctional class there was the daughter of two psychiatrists who for years thought she was a horse; everyone let her wander the corridors on all fours. No problem. Self expression and all that. Then there was the daughter of hyper-wealthy Wall Street types who had her own floor-through Park Avenue apartment from which she ran an upscale drug and prostitution business. Quite the budding entrepreneur. Schulman's island is full of warped young people like that and it's not a pretty sight.
Maybe they might all benefit from boot camp....Is that Schulman's point? Or is she saying they would have been better off without the all the money and privilege? Well that's probably true, too and it's one of the reasons I support more steeply progressive, higher marginal tax rates (but I digress....) Still, plenty of sane parents with wealth know how to set limits for their kids and manage to raise children who are not monsters.
4. Maybe she was just doing an extended essay on the wonders of nature and the human body. This is the one thing she does incredibly well. The many, many scenes of dissection are brilliant; bodies, even dead ones, are miraculous. Jane Guy's growing sense of the wonder of her own body, and of the strange mysteries unveiled in her dissections are powerfully written.
5. A coming of age novel? Sort of okay. Jane's mind is interesting to inhabit and her out-of-body exam and study experiences took me back to some of my more grueling graduate and post-graduate moments. I loved it when Jane finally learns how to learn and, against all odds, begins to rise to the top of her class. But Jane's decisions in the last third of the book are so morally ambiguous and unsympathetic that I couldn't give her a rousing cheer at the close. Pretty much everyone else was so loathsome and self-destructive that I longed for the whole place and its inhabitants to vanish in a volcanic eruption. No such luck.
Content rating R. Sensitive souls should treat this one like toxic waste.
Fortunately I found a lovely, inspirational Elizabeth Goudge story The Scent of Water to expunge most of this from my memory banks. And once I click save on this review I plan to read a few more good clean reads to erase any mental bots and malicious malware that Audrey Schulman might have installed on my brain.
August 25, 2020
Since I loved another of this author's books (Theory of Bastards) so much, I expected to like this book more than I did. Unfortunately, not only was it full of things I don't enjoy reading about (dysfunctional families, helpless/hopeless people, YOUNG irresponsible people), but I missed the point entirely by the end. The only characters I cared about at all were Keefer and Jonah (the shark).
February 11, 2022
This was totally outside what I normally read, but a fellow writer recommended another of Schulman's works and the library had this one in stock so I figured I'd give her a try. The storyline slowly pulled me in and along and gets completely inside the main character's head. Seeing life through the female perspective was quite eye-opening.
May 11, 2019
I would actually give this book 4.5 stars. I love the author’s writing style. I loved the symbolism between the autopsy and Jane peeling away her layers and figuring out who she is. Intense.
August 16, 2019
This is a page-turner, but not as heart-pounding as The Cage. Audrey Schulman does not disappoint!
March 6, 2015
Idiosyncratic word usage got on my nerves. Crunkle for crinkle. Used the word "rasp" too many times to count. Inordinate attention to how Jane (the protagonist) was breathing and if her mouth was open (just about all the time). Ponderous. I almost gave up halfway through, but alternately skimmed and read until the end. It reminded me, and not in a good way, of GRAPES OF WRATH, where humidity and stickiness/sweat take the place of incessant rain, and an overwhelmingly dark story stays that way. I agree with another reviewer who mentioned there is too much detail about cadavers and their dismemberment. There's also a lot of different types of abuse here (parental, sexual, teacher, pier, animal) and no message redeems any of it...so what's the point? You an almost feel some compassion for Jane at the novel's beginning (despite heavy-handed depiction of self centered/absorbed parents), but by midway through you are tired of her navel-gazing, and by the novel's end you don't really care about someone who would seek sex with a man who recently tried to set her afire. How can you?
October 24, 2015
Not exactly sure how to rate this book, perhaps 3.5 stars. Overall, there was a lot of subtext with the characters, that never really resolved. This kept my attention, but was also frustrating. Seems you were meant to understand everyone's motivation, but given very little back story. Why did Jane not get into US med schools, and why did she agree to attend Queens? Why was Marlene drinking so much? Why was Keefer so horribly sad? Why was Michael an unacknowledged perv? Who can really say? Maybe med school in the tropics is just a festering cess pool of crazy...maybe that's the message.
August 14, 2012
Schulman seems to like writing about people who don't fit in for various reasons. Unfortunately I just couldn't identify with the main character--she remained annoying throughout. Schulman is an excellent writer though.
October 29, 2008
Another brilliant book by Audrey Schulman. Best representation of losing weight I've ever read, and love her ability to look at the creepy and not flinch.
September 3, 2012
Kind of a strange story. Had to skim a lot - too many graphic details of the central character's work with a cadaver in medical school.
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November 19, 2012Swimming with a shark at medical school in Indonesia
January 19, 2013
troubling but thought provoking.
April 2, 2017
Yikes! Only, under-achieving daughter of cold and wealthy parents is exiled to an Indonesian island to study medicine where the psychological abuse, physical entrapments and stress of the regime cause the timid young woman to claim her own identity and face and meet her challenges. Creepy, stealthy, a "Jaws" of a book waiting to strike.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews