FICTION

SWIMMER IN THE SECRET SEA by William Kotzwinkle (Chronicle: $10.95; 91 pp.) “I built a house for us, with a room for him,” writes William Kotzinkle in the fictional voice of Laski, “and now I’m building his casket. There’s no difference in the work. We simply must go along, eyes open, watching our work carefully, without any extra thoughts. Then we flow with the night.” This novella, first published in “Prize Stories 1975: The O. Henry Awards,” has been out of print since 1981 and richly deserves its own covers. Kotzwinkle, who went on to write “The Fan Man,” “Fata Morgana, “ the novelization of E.T. and, most recently, “The Game of Thirty,” like the father in “Swimmer,” lives in the North, on an island in Maine. This account of the birth and loss of a child is so spare and direct and intimate that it’s hard to believe this is not a personal history, something Kotzwinkle had to write before moving on. For 10 years, Laski and his wife try, against medical advice, to have a child. “Life enslaves us, makes us want children, gives us a thousand illusions about love, and all so that it can go forward.” They finally become pregnant. After a detailed, bone-crushing description of the labor and birth (the literary equivalent of the home video), the “swimmer in the secret sea” is born. “And this, thought Laski, is why we labor, so that love might come into the world.” The rest is almost unbearably sad; every detail of the next few days in the hospital, then of burying the baby in the woods, from the lie that Laski tells the other proud father in the hallway who asks him what he had (“A boy”) to the building of the casket (which must remind the reader of the shape and feel of the book), to the cry of his wife: “He never got to live at all!” It’s a very sad story that happens all the time. “We simply must go along, eyes open, watching our work carefully. . . .”