Pond by Claire-Louise BennettRiverhead Books (Penguin Random House), 2016 (Originally Stinging Fly Press, 2015)

I don’t know whether to call Pond a novel or a collection of linked stories: it consists of named pieces of varying length, all but one of which are first-person narrations, with the same narrator. A novel with a shift at the very end? Whatever it is, I found myself alternately enjoying it and not. I found it well-written, with a strong voice, but that strong voice is pretty much all there is: there is little in the way of plot or character, other than the sense of our narrator’s character we get through her voice, and I found the whole thing a bit claustrophobic, and a little off-putting, but I think that may well be intentional. Our narrator lives in a cottage somewhere in the west of Ireland; she was an academic at some point, or was trying to be, but seems not to be at present. She sleeps with people; she has friends; she throws a party. But largely it feels like she moves through her days alone/in her head, and these stories are very concerned with the way she moves through her days. She talks about breakfast: “Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice” (3). She talks about her fading nail-polish and the dirt under her nails: “They look like the hands of someone very charming and refined who has had to dig themselves up out of some dank and wretched spot they really shouldn’t have fallen into” (6-7). She talks about coming to a literal and figurative standstill after a break-up, and about fleeing the room after giving an academic talk, and about how the knobs on her stove are eventually all going to break and she’s not sure what she’ll do then. There are some really lovely bits, like when she talks about lying in the garden on a blanket listening to insects and various kinds of birds:

And each sound was a rung that took me further upwards, and in this way it was possible for me to get up really high, to climb up past the clouds, towards a bird-like exuberance, where there is nothing at all but continuous light and acres of blue. (25)

Some of the shorter pieces in the book are funny and really well-paced: there’s one called “First Thing” that’s only a page that’s about waking up after having had maybe too much beer the previous night, and having to deal with a ratcatcher coming to take care of a rat in her cottage, which ends like this: “And because I wasn’t really here I didn’t yet know how I like things, so I put two sugars and milk into my coffee, because that’s how the ratcatcher takes his” (29). A piece called “Wishful Thinking” was another highlight for me, as was “Stir-fry,” which you can read in full in Jia Tolentino’s review on the New Yorker website.

Also, I really like this, from “Finishing Touch”:

Quite often I’m terribly disappointed by how things turn out, but it’s usually my own fault for the simple reason that I’m too quick to conclude that things have turned out as fully as it is possible for them to turn, when in fact, quite often, they are still on the turn and have some way to go until they have turned out completely. (80)


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