Jake Casella Brookins Reviews Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham

Swim Home to the Vanished, Brendan Shay Basham (Harper 978-0-0632-4108-4, $30.00. 240pp, hc) August 2023. Cover by Elina Cohen.

Brendan Shay Basham’s debut novel Swim Home to the Vanished is a gorgeously writ­ten story of magical transformations, and of grief. Following a Diné man cast adrift by loss, it’s a novel both fluid and sharp, full of shapeshifters and enchanted landscapes, rich in dialog and insight.

After the death of his brother, Damien seems to be transforming into a fish, growing gills behind his ears and dreaming of life in the water – unquiet dreams that spill over into his waking experience. Leaving behind his life as a professional chef, Damien wanders through a richly described (though geographically indeterminate) landscape, eventually coming to a small coastal fishing town defined by a family of brujas – a family mourning its own losses, recent and otherwise. Taken in by the variously magical sisters Marta, Paola, and their mother Ana María, Damien finds himself working for them in their seaside restaurant, try­ing to drink away his grief as magical and natural disasters loom.

There’s a poetic thickness to Basham’s writing, a distilled or compressed kind of density: torrents of imagery and sensory detail, abrupt but organic viewpoint jumps that let us see and hear what other characters are experiencing. This is an in­tensely quotable, underline-able book. I’m always a little hesitant to use ‘‘magical realism,’’ for fear of miscategorizing, but the way that Swim Home to the Vanished’s realities hinge on language is masterful. What’s clearly magical, what’s mun­dane, what’s metaphor – all change, and combine, from sentence to sentence. Most obvious in the animalistic imagery throughout – there are human characters who also literally seem to be animals – the novel is also suffused with vivid and magical imagery throughout its landscapes, expressing the emotional and social histories contained within.

This is a novel tensioned between sorrow­ful displacement and sorrowful place. Much of Damien’s grief is in detachment, in separation: parents gone into the air or the earth when he was younger, his brother swallowed by a river, he finds himself a loner, a stranger among strangers in an unfamiliar land. By contrast, the village where he washes up is anchored to its pain: the long stories of environmental and colonial degradation, the family strife that builds day after inescapable day.

At one point Damien imagines grief as a physi­cal object, choking him, but also transforming him: ‘‘The thing that is stuck in your throat be­comes you, and it takes a long time for you to feel the hurt because it is an incredibly slow process, not unlike the birth of stars.’’ Part of the novel’s genius, and its poignancy, is how that grief doesn’t vanish, isn’t resolved, how Damien’s transforma­tion remains uncanny and uncomfortable. Bits of Damien’s journey had me thinking about the similarly amphibious metamorphosis of China Miéville’s The Scar: ‘‘After injuries, a scar is what makes you whole.’’ But I don’t want to characterize this as a novel of nothing but suf­fering; there is a real richness here, magical moments conveyed in such language that they evoke wonder, flashes of hope and compassion. One of the things I love about this book is the pacing, the moments of rest. Although stress, grief, and anger shape much of the action, and although the narrative often has the feel of a troubled and troubling dream, it also has vital moments of respite.

Food is often at the center of these moments – there’s a restaurant-reality lack of romance to the food of this novel, but also deep connections to per­sonal history and to the world, to the source of what we eat. Like his character Damien, Basham himself is Diné and a ‘‘recovering chef,’’ and, along with his thorough evocation of land, people, and dreamscapes, he writes the kitchen as someplace intensely real; the food and drink of the novel are magical, sources of blessings and curses, and also framed in the mundane brutalities of prep work and lunch rushes. There’s a wonderful specificity to the descriptions of the food here, even as Basham holds close its physical and environmental costs:

The spicy green on the mero, crimson coconut with chillo, a bright and finely minced shallot-tarragon oil for the pulpo. But Damien’s body re­members too much; the shoulder ache, the slippy knees, the shock down his right hip into his femur.

Nor, amid scheming brujas and unquiet ghosts, is the novel bereft of kindness – there’s a recurring and unpredictable thread of caring, of strange strangers’ decency. One section, where Paola and Damien visit an aunt outside the village, combines food, magic, and kindness in a way that reminded me, unexpectedly but fruitfully, of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Elsewhere, the glimmers of hope and healing amid terrifying landscapes and un­canny transformations, put me in mind of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation or Kay Chronister’s Desert Creatures.

But, it must be said, part of Swim Home to the Vanished’s potency is in how that healing remains a work in progress, something that might happen in the future: It centers pain and anger in people and in the land. The brujas ‘‘are angry with history. They despise the past because it has been so hurtful to them, and now they feel the need to destroy it.’’ And, as we learn more about the world around them – mined and poisoned, overfished, colonized, and exploited – we can see that there will be an environmental as well as a societal reckoning for these crimes, down to the obscenity of using needed, cherished, dwindling water for golf courses: ‘‘You can’t eat the grass, or the stick, or the ball, or the hole.’’

If the novel is defined by looming disaster (and it is), or by death (and it definitely is), it is also intensely human, even when its characters are halfway to nonhuman. A stealth climate-change novel, a powerful elegy for wounded lands and the loss of loved ones, and a deeply magical book, Swim Home to the Vanished feel searingly and dreamily real.

This review and more like it in the December and January 2023 issue of Locus.

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