April 18, 2025

The Float Test, by Lynn Steger Strong

I don’t know if The Corrections started it, but for a long time now, all books about unhappy families have been alike in a similar way. Grown children returned to the nest, long simmering secrets and resentments, neuroses and addictions, third person narratives moving between different perspectives, the inevitable blow-up, but THE FLOAT TEST felt like something different. It felt like more of a narrative tangle, a knot. The narrator is Jude whose mother has just died, a difficult and demanding woman, and part of the narrative trajectory is Jude and her three siblings unpacking their relationship with her, the cutting edge of her affection and attention. Although Jude does not make herself the centre of the story, that place belonging to her older sister Fred, whose story Jude “imagines herself into,” portraying moments and incidents she would not be party too. Which is interesting, because Fred is the storyteller in the family, a novelist who has helped herself to bits and pieces of other people’s lives, her family included, scattering these throughout her fiction, and also something has happened between Fred and Jude that isn’t clear. And the backdrop to all of this is Florida, where the family comes from, and to where Fred and Jude both have been loathe to return, where the vultures are circling, the hottest summer ever so everyone is dripping with sweat, and swimming is the only respite—the novel’s title comes from the test that Jude and her siblings were never able to pass because their talent has always been for striving, moving, winning, instead of stopping, floating, being. And there is something suspended about the narrative too, all of the siblings stranded in the in-between in various ways, except for these absolutely wrenching moments that hit on the complicated nature of love, how it can be riddled with pain, the impossible gnarl that is family and history and that place from which we come.