Dryland by Sara Jaffe
Review by Jess Moody
Ah, nostalgia. Mmm. Apparently in these Interesting Times we’re all reaching for bygone years as never before: revisiting our pop culture references, our cult classics catechism; streaming safe and (supposedly) more innocent times. Fair enough: we can understand the current insatiable appetite for known knowns. But nostalgia is not all bittersweet rememberings and rose-tinted flashbacks: a lesson those who’ve lived through queer youth know all too well. What perfect timing then for us to put aside the usual Proustian madeleines: for here is Sara Jaffe’s Dryland, and the clean, cold cut of chlorine.
It’s 1992, Oregon, and fifteen year-old Julie is quietly navigating high school, friendships, and her brother’s swim-star legacy. She carefully sidesteps her best friend’s incessant oggling of skaterboys (‘If Erika and I stopped being friends, it might be sad for a moment, and then okay’). She patiently snips cuttings for Yearbook. She tries to be really helpful to Alexis, the popular girl who wears her hair just so, smells just so, looks at her a certain way, sometimes, maybe? And occasionally Julie sneaks off to an out-the-way store to flip through swimming magazines, searching for an unstated something: without success.
When Alexis suggests Julie join her and her friends on the swim team, and an older guy offers to make her a mix-tape, the dance of teenage angst begins. And what a dance it is. Jaffe’s sharp, swift, questioning prose perfectly captures the reactive, doubting inner narrative of youth (‘Should someone who didn’t know me be talking to me about pornos? Should he be talking like he knew me and making quotes with his fingers?’). Something as seemingly simple as the purchase of a swimsuit, the exact words of a phone call, the uncertainty of what one is supposed to do and be: Julie’s voice makes it all so exquisite and agonising and hilariously, tragically real.
This is a book that knows its audience. It jumps us right into the nineties deep end: the R.E.M. soundtrack (‘a junk-box list of lyrics, words like rusted parts in a yard’), the clothes (oh the clothes!), the bedroom phone extension, and the troubled teen understandings of gay life in the time of the AIDS crisis. Jaffe – writer, musician, educator – tempts us in with a knowing wink, and then pats us on the head lovingly: oh honey, hold on.
She teases and queers all the well-known tropes: the sports narrative, fallen heroes, high school drama, and closet clichés– all joyously embraced and thoroughly dunked. Secret swim lessons act as proxy for the parental coming out story (will they spot her wet hair? Does she smell of chlorine??). Getting the Girl is not the triumphant freeze-frame ending, but a more complex beginning. The mystery magazine search may reveal that some secrets were clear all along. It’s all very, very well crafted. Relish in particular how we’re set up to see Julie’s first swim through the familiar lens of the underdog story, Freddie’s plaintive ‘we are the champions’ in your ears even before the crowds chant on the page, the prose glorious and strident and poetic – and Jaffe absolutely wrecks us with her key change.
Dryland is a shining, drizzled, indie love-song of queer joy; a bruised deep blue B-side to consume in one sitting then set on repeat; shouting along to the plaintive refrain you always knew you always knew. A story that understands the complexity of maturing friendships, the comfort of found family, and the clarity that comes with finding ‘your people’. Don your denim jacket (fleece lining, optional), get your mix-tape ready, face your truths, and dive, dive, dive.
Dryland is published by Cipher Press, 16th March 2021