Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, a collection of surreal vignettes that, for Jia Tolentino, “altered [one’s] state of consciousness like a drug”, appeared in 2015. It’s been a long and longing wait, then, for Checkout 19, a flightily autofictive work in seven sections and amorphous Bennett style. This is a book about reading, about a working-class girl nourishing her personality with books and coming to write with addictive devotion herself, but it has none of the sedateness implied by a book about books. Instead, the style of Pond – a billowing erudition – runs free, taking darker avenues this time.
In A Silly Business, a child remembers taking out six to 12 books from the library, finding too many books a distraction and deciding it's better to take one: "And of course this aggravated people. Yes. Yes. Yes it did. No end. Is that all you're taking out, they'd exclaim." This they – the world, of adults and schoolmates and, later, boyfriends – must be managed or escaped. She secretes Roald Dahl's Switch Bitch from a dining room cabinet and reads Alan Sillitoe aloud to a mother who is home between shifts in a department store. A teacher she has a crush on finds her stories and asks for more, creating a glittering situation in which first forages into writing are tinged with desire.
As in Pond, the voice is precise, luxuriant and absurd, especially when it runs to lists. The theme of class, its insidious influence on a person’s access and experience, is brought to life, often, in this way: in Bright Spark, a beloved grandmother fills her guests’ hands with “telephones, tea towels, slippers, irons, iced buns, umbrellas, candlesticks, air fresheners, photograph albums, gloves”. When things are going well, her parents follow the principle that abundance indicates prosperity, so there are “croissants on Sundays and banana shampoo and maidenhair ferns and holidays in the Canary Islands and gold-plated bathroom taps and pavlova and 501s and Flower Fairies and Wayfarers and Feast ice creams” – a rhapsody which ends with the narrator realising that she has the same bedspread as Helena Bonham Carter.
Bennett cuts through melancholy with hilarity frequently: “It was intoxicating to look at a photograph of Helena Bonham Carter sitting on a bed that looked just like mine. It encouraged me to feel there wasn’t a great deal of difference between us – as I gazed at her romantic mass of twinkling curls I could feel my own sullen slew of rats’ tails augmenting magnificently.”
Godawful man
On a teenage pilgrimage to the Florence of A Room with a View, the narrator is first assailed by a godawful man from Wooten Bassett (he boasts that he is securing a top-rate leather jacket for cheap) and later alienated to find, re-reading Forster’s book, that “it just wasn’t a book you could get lost in, and yet at one time I had got completely lost in it – and what a very beautiful unsurpassable sort of raptness that had been”.
Such tugs-of-war between reality and fantasy recur. Bennett is capable of breathtakingly beautiful description – “The mirrors were frameless and thin, the tiles white and the grouting between them black and crumbling like boneyard soil, and the stark taps obdurate and shrill. The water that twisted out of them however was clear and soundless as fresh-blown glass” – and of eccentricity. There is a moving and spectacular gap between boneyard grime and loneliness and the cascades of old-world fantasy blended, in All Things Nice, with memories: “terrapins, vanilla pods, pineapples, bathwater, plumes, tinctures, tazze, candelabra, banana shampoo, maidenhair ferns, gold-plated taps, manicure sets, iced buns, tan tights, lapsang souchong, avocados, minty chocolate, the cherry moon – and what then, what then?” Here is where despair sometimes intrudes on unsurpassable rapture.
Brilliant strangeness
We see this especially in We Were the Drama. Now a student, the narrator travels to Brighton spontaneously, buys a lamé skirt and drifts through dingy boarding houses, unable to get her boyfriend to meet her. Her aloneness begins to be quietly watermarked by the story of the working-class avant garde writer Ann Quin, who drowned off Brighton in 1973. Bennett’s assessment is important: “If your immediate locale doesn’t offer you very much in terms of dependable boundaries it’s not entirely inconceivable is it that you’ll end up writing a kaleidoscopic sort of prose that is constantly shuffling the distinction between objects and beings, self and other, and conceives of the world in terms of form and geometry, texture and tone … ” The experience is not heroic but harrowing – a response to the world by a sensitive person without any protections against that world – and it describes, with a political clarity that is absent from Pond, the brilliant strangeness of Bennett’s own style.
Pond was a brief, unique and chic work by a gifted prose stylist; Checkout 19, which delves deeper and more courageously into similar themes (books, sex, isolation and female independence) confirms Bennett’s ingenuity. Thrilling, rich and strange.
