Jessica Anthony's darkly comic novella

It all started with one act of defiance . . . She refused to get out of the pool. 

The last time I was at Barnes & Noble, a bookseller talked me into purchasing The Most, a slim novella by Jessica Anthony. (Btw: it is a B&N Monthly Pick for August 2024.)

Many reviews compare it to John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” and while both literary works are set in 1950s East Coast suburbia, feature a swimming pool, and deal with the theme of infidelity, Cheever’s and Anthony’s writing styles couldn’t be more different. While Cheever’s writing is lushly descriptive, Anthony’s is quite spare, even concise. The novella itself is only 133 pages, so you can definitely read it in one sitting.

The thing that I liked most about this novel was its structure. Very similar to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which takes place over the course of one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, The Most takes place on an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957 when Kathleen Beckett awakes “feeling poorly” and decides not to attend church with her husband Virgil and sons Nathaniel and Nicholas. Instead, she puts on her old red bathing suit from college and gets into the swimming pool at the center of her apartment complex, which no one has swam in for years. When her husband returns from church, he is incredulous to discover that his wife is still lounging in the pool . . . and that she is completely unwilling to get out. 

On the surface, the Becketts seem to have everything going for them. They are both young and attractive, they have two healthy young sons, and they’re living the suburban dream. Virgil even has a brand-new Buick Bluebird that he drives around town. Over the course of the novel, though, it comes out that their relationship, in fact, is riddled with lies, untold truths, and infidelities on both sides. I won’t reveal details because I don’t want to spoil it for you, but some of the most darkly comic passages are related to their cheating. 

While I really enjoyed reading this novel, I didn’t completely buy Kathleen’s sudden desire to come clean to her husband about her lies and to force him to be honest with her, as well. In her own words, Kathleen stays in the pool because “[o]nce she got out, everything would go back to normal, and normal was no longer acceptable. She did not know when she got up this morning that today would be the day, but so it was. Virgil had talked to Coke [his father]. She knew she would have to tell him about the past . . .” (129-130). Why was “normal” no longer acceptable to her, though? Both of them had been lying to each other for years and years. What was suddenly different? She didn’t seem to have a change of heart or moral reckoning, so her motivation felt flimsy to me.  

Having said that, I do think The Most is worth reading. It's just a borrow rather than a buy, in this reader's humble opinion.

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