"The Swimmer" opens on a humorous note: it "was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, 'I drank too much last night,'" the narrator says. It is a beautiful summer day, and a large white cloud "like a city seen from a distance" is on the horizon. Neddy Merrill, a slender and young-looking man, sits beside the pool with a glass of gin. He decides that he could "reach his home. .. eight miles to the south ... by water." He can swim home via the pools of the inhabitants of the suburbs where he lives. He names the string of pools the "Lucinda River " after his wife Lucinda.

This is not such a strange idea for him to have, the narrator reveals, because "he was ... determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure." Beginning at the...