SWIM HOME TO THE VANISHED

A young Diné man fleeing a tragic past encounters an equally fraught present.

Six months after his younger brother Kai’s drowning death, Damien, a restaurant chef who’s still wracked by grief at that loss and the earlier unexplained disappearances of his parents, quits his job and departs on a hallucinatory journey that will transport him to an environment even more discomfiting than the one he’s desperate to escape. That setting is an impoverished seaside village where Damien is drawn into the complex dynamics of a family of three women—Ana María and her daughters Paola and Marta—who themselves are mourning the recent murder of their daughter and sibling, Carla. Damien goes to work in the family’s makeshift food service operation on the beach, and he’s soon exposed to the sisters’ suspicions that their mother was involved in both Carla’s death and the earlier disappearance of their father at sea. Paola and Marta try to enlist Damien in their plots and counterplots against their despised mother, who exerts a sort of domination over the village owing largely to her unexplained ability to replenish a fish supply decimated by overfishing. The clashes among these three women, who may be brujas, climax in the chaos of an apocalyptic hurricane that’s described in terrifying detail. Basham’s debut novel is complex and enigmatic, featuring a mythic sensibility and elements of magical realism, including the early stages of Damien’s metamorphosis into a fish and other characters’ taking on the physical characteristics of lizards and insects. The novel’s prose is lush and evocative, and there’s an almost erotic charge to Basham’s writing about food, a central element in the story. He tries to give the novel a larger thematic resonance by alluding to the tragedy of the Long Walk—the dispossession of Damien’s ancestors, some 10,000 members of the Navajo (Diné) tribe in the 1860s—as well as the impact of climate change.

An ambitious first novel whose intriguing parts never fully come together into a satisfying whole.