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Disturbing the Waters

A cannonball is, of course, a weapon. It is also, in swimming, a dive, or, perhaps better, the artless opposite of a dive: in competitive diving the goal is to enter the water vertically, smoothly, without disturbing the surface; the goal of the cannonball is to disturb the water—and the other swimmers and, if you’re good, the people lounging around the pool—as much as possible. Joseph McElroy’s new novel Cannonball opens with what the narrator, a serious but slow on the uptake teenager named Zach, calls “the mother and brother of all cannonballs,” launched by his soonto-be friend, Umo, an enormous, fourteen-year-old, Mexican? Chinese?, homeless, illegal immigrant: