God, I miss parties – the noise, the elbowing of it. I want to spend a hot Christmas at a packed terrace in Melbourne. That’s not actually something I’ve done, but Madeleine Ryan’s debut novel A Room Called Earth plus-oned me along.
On a dense, muggy Christmas Eve Eve, an unnamed autistic woman bathes, gets dressed and sips her customary going-out vodka martini with olives. She’s spent the season alone, besides her cat Porkchop, a family photo and a signed poster of Heath Ledger. A taxi takes her through Melbourne under piercing moonlight, the streets filled with fauna – lavender, daisies, jacarandas, camellias – but deserted of people. She gets out a block early: she wants to savour the eclipse and the hum of the party in the distance. “I’m yours, party,” the heroine resolves at the gate. “Take me away.”
And it does. She needs no stimulants: “The experience that I already have of the world is so psychedelic and sensual.” She questions her sexuality: “in 3D” she has only been with men, but her mind is malleable. She’s self-conscious in groups, and not irrationally so; if our autistic narrator followed her own instincts then many would read malice into it. Instead, she play-acts. “That said,” she confesses, “I do get tired of having to ‘earn my keep’ everywhere I go.”
She primes herself to spend the party trying her best to please others. Then she meets a man in the bathroom queue, and he changes her night.
For the narrator, feelings are an end in themselves: “Dancing in the rain doesn’t ‘make sense’ and it doesn’t have a specific ‘outcome’. Well, it does, it’s just that the physical outcome tends to involve being wet, and cold, and needing to go inside, and get warm, and have a shower, and maybe have a cup of tea, which is part of what I like about it.” Good, bad, confusing: it’s all input, and she sweeps you up in her enthusiasm.
The word “anyway” often diverts a stream of consciousness: “I’m either completely immersed in myself, or completely immersed in someone else. There’s no in-between. Anyway.” She’ll never run out of world to observe. And she’s funny with it, too: “Like, I could be stabbed multiple times, and I swear to god I will hear myself thinking, ‘Fascinating, fascinating … ’ ”
Settler colonialism
The tone is sometimes annoyingly chatty and the dialogue can be unconvincing (“The whole see-through thing makes everyone go mental”). If you lose patience when literary narrators ponder geopolitical evils they can’t personally rectify, this one mightn’t be for you. But it would have been strange if, for instance, the narrative had elided Australia’s settler colonialism. The protagonist is forever seeking patterns, so she would have to be really trying not to notice the system on which her country was built.
This acknowledgment of issues that cannot be solved within a novel reminded me of Raven Leilani’s bestselling debut, Luster, as did Ryan’s sensory details and her mordant humour: “She loved going to parties with me because her body had a lot more to say to the opposite sex than I did. Her big cheekbones, and white-blonde hair, and large breasts made for very engaging conversation.”
In writing an autistic character, Ryan takes a similar approach to Michelle Gallen’s Costa-shortlisted Big Girl, Small Town: while the marketing specifies the protagonist’s neurology, there’s no precise label within either novel. I was reminded, too, of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, and Earthlings (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori), both featuring introspective young women at odds with their environment.
Rather than pandering to a pathologised external gaze, Ryan’s narrator evokes how many autistic people see ourselves: the normal ones in a sea of non-autistic weirdos. People on the spectrum are often asked to explain how our autism “manifests” – but I do not, day to day, cross-reference my every thought against the DSM-5.
It’s strangely common for reviews of books like this one to note: “Not a lot happens, but.” Why the “but”? Reviewers of historical romances don’t feel compelled to warn the reader that the characters won’t have iPhones. From the blurb and the conventions of voice-driven novels, we know that A Room Called Earth will be an observational slice of life. If you don’t want a slice, don’t read this. If you do want a slice, it’s delicious.
Fiction needn’t always claim that being a young woman is something to recover from, something to get over. Authors are not duty-bound to show that such protagonists have thought better of it by the end. “Why are you still here?” Ryan’s narrator is asked, and the character responds: “It’s just ... where I am.”
Sometimes it’s worth meeting someone where they’re at. In this case, I much enjoyed the view.
Naoise Dolan is author of Excititng Times
