Book Review: Julie Orringer’s How to Breathe Underwater

Breathing is the most involuntary of human motions. We barely notice it until it feels like we can’t, pressure so thick upon our chests that we feel like we’re drowning underwater. This is the concept behind Julie Orringer’s debut compilation of nine short stories, How to Breathe Underwater, where she immerses her characters in the darkest depths of human emotion and tragedy and leads them through it to higher ground. In her first short story, “Pilgrims,” we follow children Ben and Ella through a Thanksgiving dinner with strangers and a band of orphans. With the adults distracted by helping to heal Ben and Ella’s own mothers’ terminal illness, the two children are sent to play with the motherless rascals outside. In one instance, Orringer describes the fatal fall of one of the orphaned girls from a tree-house balcony. She displays the unceremonious burial of the girl with the quick, concrete sentences of a child’s mind and carries on with the story as if nothing happened. As questions of guilt and sadness plagued Ben and Ella, Orringer leads them away from the tragedy of strangers to focus on the empathy needed for their own mother; a twist of death and healing that Orringer masterfully dictates through the naive eyes of a child.In “Note to Sixth-Grade Self,” Orringer deftly creates the do’s and don’ts that any shy, introverted sixth grade girl with few friends and low self-esteem would need to make it through the terrifying experience of a dance competition. Her use of the second person to create this bullet-point-list-turned-short-story drives home the roller coaster emotions contained within a day of the young girl’s life. Even as the girl’s self-esteem gains momentum and her hopes rise at the prospect of dancing with the boy she adores, Orringer twists the knife of adolescent insecurity by plummeting every hope of pursuing her dream and giving the chance away to someone prettier. Another story, “The Isabel Fish,” is one of the most amazing of the nine story compilation and carries Orringer’s concept of incredible strife and the process of healing. Here, we find a young woman struggling to find inner peace after solely surviving a drowning accident with her brother’s girlfriend, Isabel. As she confronts her fears of water through a scuba diving course at the YMCA with her brother Sage, she deals with the pressures to secede from her family, her friends, and the memories of the incident that haunt her fragile state of mind. In one passage, Orringer relates the young woman’s near-death experience to her science experiment of exotic fish, sabotaged by Sage in a fit of anger:”That night, after a quiet dinner at which Sage does not appear and at which I pretend to my parents that nothing is wrong, I take the yogurt container and walk the mile to the pond, which isn’t even a real natural pond but an ornamental small lake near the east entrance of Gettyswood. I crouch in the grass near a fake dock and unwrap the fish and throw them into the water one by one. It doesn’t take me long to realize how ridiculous I must look, hurling tiny fish into a pond. They float on top, dark shapes against the moonlit surface, and I know they will probably be eaten by birds or by other fish.” (pg. 68)Orringer creates a powerful comparison with the death of the young girl’s experimental fish to the death of Isabel, and her own struggle to survive the accident and the following months. She symbolically disposes the fish in the same pond at which the accident occurred, like a sacrifice to the ghost of Isabel beneath the water. In her last line, Orringer truly captures the turmoil within the mind of this survivor. Had she drowned alongside Isabel, others would have taken on the guilt and the pressures of living after the nightmare. But because she escaped the submerged vehicle, she would be the one who could recount the last moments of Isabel’s life and keep her image and memory from fading away into the dark recesses of the adult world.Imaginative and stunning, How to Breathe Underwater is written with something like a mother’s love for each young character portrayed. Orringer is unique in her depiction of tragic predicaments of abandonment and inner turmoil; calling out for the young adults she creates to buoy themselves to the hope that their resistance will yield better prospects in the future. A startling, brilliant, never-want-it-to-end book, Orringer will capture your heart and take your breath away. How to Breathe Underwater is available at Borders, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com for $21.00.