“No one at home ever said they loved me. If I'd asked, I know they would have said yes, Mamma and Pappa, of course they loved me. Only I didn't ask, part of the reason being that I didn't want Pappa getting angry. And of course it was such an unquestionable thing. Like god loving mankind. It's something you know. Why couldn't I feel it?”
So starts this book in which the author, a writer, recounts her relationship with a much younger man, M, from whom she fears violence, and remembers the threat of violence in the family in which she grew up, from which her mother fled.
There are two interwoven narratives. There is the one above, which sounds like a memoir, and there is the novel that the writer is trying to write. This novel sounds highly autobiographical. Both protagonists are recovering from a bereavement. Both are dating a much younger man. But the frame narrative is the one that has the constant fear of domestic violence, which seems to be the fundamental theme of the book.
What distinguished this book was the quality of the prose. She tended to write long paragraphs, sometimes containing rambling sentences full of comma-separated phrases, such as this one: “It's like we've gone behind a curtain and discovered a hidden place, the pond at the centre of everything, a place where there's no through-wind anymore, where everything that isn't carried along on the whirling current instead loses momentum and is deposited at the side and then just lies there, hesitantly almost, until enough detritus has collected and something else takes over and sort of shoves it into motion, gets it going again, a little bit more, come on, only then, eventually, when it's no longer possible to get any further, when there's nothing else left to come and carry it along, it all just collects at the side again, in the stagnant water.” (p 60) She has an inconsistent relationship with question-marks, as here: “How long does the beginning last. When does the beginning melt into something else, and become a person's days. And when do those days change, and become something else still.” (p 14) The idiosyncrasies were unimportant, what I loved was the way she could write about some transcendent ideas is very simple terms yet at the same time produce prose that seemed full of illumination. Look at that quote about the pond again. Isn't it brilliant?
Selected quotes:- “It wasn't leaving the milk out, it was being that sort of person. The sort who's negligent, thoughtless, who never pays heed.” (p 8)
- “All I know is that I was afraid, afraid was a skin beneath my skin that couldn't be shed.” (p 8)
- “Love was something others were doing. I saw it in films and could imitate it. But it wouldn't let me in. I had no idea how to do it.” (p 10)
- “She looks down into the water, as if the water was a membrane and there was another world underneath.” (p 12)
- “The way everything is so big and there's no movement anywhere. As if she's a little girl in an over-dimensioned house surrounded by streets and trees and enormous skyscrapers, the big river rushing its course, and all around, to all sides, the endless prairie. The path leading across the lawns, and there’s such a long way to the cars and to the outside walls of the house. Space between all things.” (p 27)
- “Every moment, no matter if it hurts, no matter if it's terrible, is so intense then, it bursts open, and everything else is shoved out to the edges.” (p 34)
- “There's something we're permitted to see and there's something else for absolutely not permitted to see, and it's the line between those two things that makes the image shimmer.” (p 90)
- “Are we put together from multiple parts, where some of those parts are rudimentary and primitive and small, while others are bigger, older, more grown-up, competent and responsible? Do all those parts rattle around us, and who if anyone knows how they fit together? Is there someone who takes care of it all, who keeps us together, holds us tight and looks after us? Or is it all just parentless chaos in there, a legion of different-aged children, some retreated into the darkness of corners, others running around, boisterous and physical, sometimes at odds, while still others attempt to maintain order, meeting out punishments and keeping the rest in check?” (p 154)
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