The True Fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett

Kimmo Rosenthal has turned from a career in mathematics and teaching to writing. Some of his recent work has appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Fib Review, The Decadent Review, Hinterland, BigCityLit, and Tiny Molecules. He also has a Pushcart Prize nomination.

I

“And the pen was done, spent, happy, and lay there now, smoldering on top of the closed exercise book. Spent, yes, but I know now what it was capable of.”

- Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout-19

Yes, indeed, and now so do we after reading Checkout 19. Flaubert, in his letters, describes his ideal of the expressive possibilities of prose: “Let us strum our guitars and clash our cymbals, and whirl like dervishes in the eternal hubbub of Forms and Ideas.” In Checkout 19, the prose strums, clashes, and whirls in its love of language, encouraging the reader to partake in the revelries. Bennett’s writing is uniquely voiced, shapeshifting, and vertiginous.

II

“By writing, as by reading, one can pick one’s own ancestors and establish a second, intellectual hereditary line to rival conventional biological heritage.”

- Judith Schalansky, An Inventory of Losses

“We read in order to come to life.” So proclaims the narrator near the end of the book, which is about a life refracted through the lens of literature, amidst the on-going struggle between the uncertain self and a seemingly intractable world. Reading allows us to withdraw, while at the same time enriching our worldview. Bennett’s narrator also writes in order to come to life, in pursuit of her goal to “write freely, expressively, and fearlessly.” She searches for her true self with literature as the guide. Reading and writing provide the intellectual heredity and scaffolding to support her as she tries to balance on the tightrope between reality and the imagination.

III

“A unique and inimitable entity impossible to define or classify.”

- Gerald Murnane, A Million Windows

How does one really explain or describe this book? Any attempt at explanation is bound to be inadequate. What ultimately comes to mind is the above phrase by Gerald Murnane. As in his notion of “true fiction”, Bennett’s book is an “an account of certain of the contents of the mind of her narrator.” Her narrator not only reports on things that have happened, but also on “what it is to know that such things may have happened.” She excavates memories and seeming-memories from the past, and the imagery that arises from them.

IV

“Style is the sensuous surface of art.”

- Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

So proclaims Susan Sontag in her famous essay, ‘On Style.’ In a novel without a plot, style must carry the day. Nowadays, too often, the expressive beauty of language is sacrificed at the altar of so-called relatability and accessibility. Claire-Louise Bennett’s fluvial writing is a lifeboat in which I am carried along on waves of literary allusions, sentences, metaphors, words and lists (one marvelous list has 27 entries.) Her exuberant, undulant prose is unbeholden to conventions or forms, in fact it breaches those very forms. Moreover, it has a disarmingly light tone, with deft touches of irony. As I read, I can visualize the knowing wink at the reader, and the arch smile.

V

“Language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself.”

- William Gass, The William Gass Reader

Words sparkle on the page, phrase after phrase making me wish I could write so imaginatively. There is lovely alliteration: Mrs. Selby’s name “sounded satiny, sibilant, and suited her well”; delightful neologisms like “globuliferous”; wonderfully obscure words like “skew-whiff”; unexpected juxtapositions such as “juddering grace” and “pendulous chandelier of lambent gloom”; marvelous metaphors as when a classmate’s attempt at drawing a portrait arranges the facial features “as if they were the sloppy toppings of an extravagant pizza”. The verbal topography of her sentences, some quite long and complex, is full of surprises.

VI

“The structure is gradually woven, and in creating itself, it increasingly magnetizes.”

- Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

Checkout 19 proceeds episodically, in fragments that vary in tone from a humorous discussion of wearing someone else’s knickers, to the traumatization of date-rape by her erstwhile boyfriend, and later the discovery of a dead body. Also included are abruptly inserted fictional segments that the narrator has been working on over the years, such as the tale about Tarquin Superbus. Central to this tale is a library whose volumes are blank, except for one with “one sentence that contains everything: a key to complete and infinite lightness”. The ghost of Borges and his library of Babel hovers nearby. All of these digressive episodes form the tapestry of the narrator’s life. From its complex weave, she attempts to ascertain a pattern in her quest for this infinite lightness.

VII

“Become such as you are, once you have learned what that is.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

The muse of Nietzsche lurks in the shadows. His famous quote above might serve as an epigraph for Checkout 19, as the book describes an apprenticeship in becoming, resulting in the very book we are reading. Checkout 19 is where the narrator works, where one day a mysterious Russian man thrusts a book into her hand: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. The significance of this event only becomes clear later on, as she realizes that the Russian man has seen into her soul, “straight into the quickening revolutions of my supremely aberrant imaginings.” I read somewhere, I can no longer recall where, a quote by Henry Miller that “a writer takes a path in order to become the path.” Claire-Louise Bennett has become that path,, and we, her readers, are the beneficiaries.