Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton – review

This book is not – as its publishers would have it – a love letter to swimming. It is far more complicated. At times, it comes closer to being the opposite. It is brilliant, eccentric and moving – an immersion in a life. When Leanne Shapton was a teenager in Canada, she trained for the Olympic trials. She swam five hours a day, six days a week: "I wasn't the best; I was relatively fast. I trained, ate, travelled, and showered with the best in the country, but wasn't the best; I was pretty good." The decision not to pursue the Olympics was because her family was moving to the countryside and she did not want to live with another family. And so she quit. Today, she still dreams of "practice, of races, coaches and blurry competitors". She defines herself through her "intense years" as a competitive swimmer. When she swims now – as she is compulsively drawn to do – it is like "touching a scar".

Life moved on: Shapton shifted to a different sort of fast lane. She became an artist, author and designer of the op-ed page on the New York Times, applying a swimmer's drive to her work on land. But if water is your element – and the desire to win a habit of mind – it is not easy to leave behind with the flick of a towel. When she painted, she was often drawn to water. And writing is proving to be another way of wading back into the world of competitive swimming. She describes the pain of training and the aching limbs, remembers asking herself before she gave up: "What for?" The question persists alongside a more wistful and unanswerable "What if?"

Three years ago, Leanne Shapton published a novel, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. The title sounded like an auction catalogue – and it was. Through 331 lots, a four-year love affair, including its ending, was described. She got the idea from a 2006 sale of Truman Capote's personal effects. The novel got rave reviews and became a cult hit. In a sense, this book is its non-fictional sequel if only because, once again, there is a leaning on material things to describe another broken relationship – with swimming. The objects are steady, the rest is water.

For Shapton, there is no such thing as an inanimate object – her talent is for seeing how things and lives are fused. The book is, in part, a swimmer's showcase, a wayward wardrobe exhibiting Leanne's swimming costumes. These are presented deadpan. But sometimes the captions make one smile: "Speedo nylon bikini, used for recreational swimming, 2011. Purchased at Gadabout, Toronto. Worn in Vals, Switzerland, and Kolsva, Sweden. Bottom left behind at the Bains du Marais, Paris but later rescued from the pocket of my robe, fished out of the bottom of a laundry bag." The costumes are not uniformly black. One, a ramshackle patterned bikini, has never been worn at all. The most becoming is a vintage, blue-and-white floral swimsuit purchased in London's Portobello Road. Her story is in their fabric – she grants each one a scholarly attention (this is Swimming Studies, after all). But the overpowering feeling the costumes induce is of melancholy. They are shed skins.

Shapton has the forensic eye of a fashion editor. As a trainee swimmer, she was religious about getting her look right. Her focus was comically dull: grey sweatpants ("Sweatpants have to be grey, the cotton has to be a certain grade and thickness…"). Her penetrating eye is rivalled only by her nose. A catalogue of 14 smells bring back the period when she was training – like samples in an experiment: "Wrist beneath watchstrap: Vaseline Intensive Care, iodine and banana." "Pillow: Chlorine, mildew, faint clove and starchy mucus scent." "Parka hem: apple core, halogen, polyester shearling, dried ketchup." At a glance – or a sniff – these are ordinary yet fanatically precise. And that is the point. Shapton has a novelist's instinct for the nostalgic charge of the inconsequential. Her sense of smell is hound-sharp and she is no snob – she smells it like it is.

Water is harder to pin down but she beautifully describes her drifts of thought as she swims each lap. Of the many swims she describes, I particularly enjoyed her braving, on a visit to London two years ago, Hampstead ladies' pond at 14C. Her language is as crisp as the autumn day she describes.

The book is governed by what at first seems like randomness but she shows how chance juxtapositions make new unities – an artist's intelligence at work. It is also in London that she walks into a cake shop and orders a "lemon olive-oil cake, shiny yellow with amber edges, flecked with spiky rosemary". The cake is delicious, she begs for the recipe – is refused. Back in New York, she experiments with reproducing the cake. "Close, but off…" is her verdict. This describes her swimming life too. This is a book full of yearning – a famished narrative – the cake a symbol for a vaster appetite.

Obsession has a way of taking over: Shapton used to set her microwave to the speed 1:11:00 – the time in which she wanted to swim the 100 metre breaststroke in 1987. Obsession makes everything else secondary. We fleetingly meet Leanne's father, an engineer, and her intriguing mother from the Philippines (with a similar penchant for grey clothes). We meet her brother, Derek, who also swam competitively. And we encounter her husband, James, an inferior swimmer with a superior attitude to life: "… he doesn't see life as rigour and deprivation. To him, it is something to enjoy, where the focus is not on how to win but how to flourish." But the book is not about them. They are not much more than figures on the pool's edge.

Nor is obsession the same as love. There is much about swimming that Shapton hates. Like many competitive swimmers, she fears open water and unknown depths. And yet, in the end, this enigmatic book is written out of what cannot be fathomed – the life never lived, her own unknown depths. It is mourning disguised as inquiry in which swimming, writing and painting join forces.

Shapton even confesses that swimming is her way of understanding pictorial space: "I don't understand how to really draw until a teacher says, 'Imagine you are running your hand over the surface of what you are drawing.'" Her painted swimmers have a watery energy. Their features are painted with swift, powerful brush strokes: a slot of a mouth, a block of a nose, a bracket eyebrow. And then there are her slate grey abstracts: a variety of oblongs, squares, circles, slivers and curves. There is no difficulty in recognising them for what they are: a pooling of pools.