Katie da Cunha Lewin
The Water We Were All Swimming In
The Inland Sea, Madeleine Watts, Pushkin Press, 2021, 256pp, £8.99 (paperback)
The Weak Spot, Lucie Elven, Prototype, 2021, 176pp, £12.00 (paperback)
In a conversation in Granta magazine with Lucie Elven, Madeleine Watts observes that ‘Young women are used as vessels for a lot of cultural baggage, and encountering that baggage growing up can, I think, often make it feel like a struggle to find form’. Both women have recently published debut novels in which they think about this problem of formlessness in different ways. The protagonists of these novels, both young women, never named, encounter this difficulty time and again, finding themselves in situations in which they are unsure of themselves, of other people, and of how the world works. Though undoubtedly both are writing about power and control, they are also negotiating ways we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, and the shades that exist to that vulnerability. These are not narratives that offer answers, and where lesser novelists might reach for solutions, both Elven and Watts leave their works starkly unresolved.
Elven’s remarkable novel, The Weak Spot, is set in an unspecified European town in the mountains. Her narrator has recently completed her degree in pharmacology, and heads to a town she visited as a child in order to apprentice with the local pharmacist, August Malone, a man of about fifty. The young woman seems uncertain from her very first conversation with the pharmacist and, as she has no ready answers for the things she is asked, ‘speaks in a deliberate monotone, guessing at what he wanted [her] to say’. She finds that he seemed to be ‘snapping… and interrupting because he had already decided that I was not ready for the role’ and later suggests she might want to wait until she has children before undertaking the training. Though he does offer her a place in the pharmacy, within these first pages the terms of their relationship are immediately and uncomfortably set; we see our narrator increasingly unsure of herself under her boss’s cold and implacable gaze.
The novel is comprised of short chapters, each with a title taken from a brief phrase that appears within it, something often seemingly inconsequential. This is one of the many ways in which the novel feels a little off-kilter; though the novel remains in ostensibly the ‘real’ world (whatever that means), there is always the feeling that everything could suddenly change, the boundaries of the fiction completely redrawn, or the central players of the novel suddenly unrecognisable. Even in the sentences, there is something strangely clipped and direct, almost as if the work is a translation from another language. This is studied and controlled writing, in which the narrator’s thoughts about herself and the town where she lives are direct and precise, as if rather than a novel we are reading a report on human behaviour. Elven’s talent for atmosphere is matched in the way she unpicks her central idea about the problems – and often impossibility – of communication and conversation. August’s technique in the pharmacy is to encourage customers to speak on a whole manner of subjects, leading to long meandering conversations in which the narrator is required to undertake a strange kind of listening, finding ways of helping and diagnosing her customers through their words. But under his direction, and through these interactions, these conversations, and other people in general, start to feel like a threat to the narrator’s already shaky selfhood: ‘People’s impressions of me surprised me more and more.’
Listening and responding to others is also a facet of Madeleine Watts’s novel, The Inland Sea. Set in Australia, the novel’s narrator, a young woman who has recently completed a graduate programme in literature, takes a job at an emergency response centre, putting callers through to the service they need. When her boss explains that many people aren’t cut out for the stress and emotional charge of the job, our narrator resolves to steel herself: ‘I didn’t want to be one of the weak ones who couldn’t hack it.’ As in The Weak Spot, work is a place in which one has to hide emotion, or pretend to be the version of oneself that fits the situation. Though the narrator is able to tune out the voices she hears on the line, her gradual unravelling into increasingly self-destructive behaviour suggests that there are only so many emergencies one can take. Emergencies circle around the novel in many ways – Watts frames the novel through the increasingly extreme weather conditions across the country, as well as the narrator’s exhausting emotional state. We see this become all too much for her: ‘Every siren was personal, because the border between world and self had been – it was now clear – washed away in the flood long ago. I was swimming in it.’
It feels very significant that both writers have chosen to keep their central protagonist nameless; it seems to speak not just to their lack of security in themselves, but also in their relationships to others. Watts’s narrator partakes in a doomed affair with an ex-boyfriend, existing in such a strange state of absence that she finds it hard to envision how her actions will affect his current girlfriend, whilst Elven’s protagonist eventually loses footing from herself completely: ‘By the end of the summer I had no ego left. I could be swayed by this or that person, because no part of me resisted being disturbed… I doubted myself constantly, wondering what I had forgotten, and what I had accepted as truth by repeating it…’ On the other hand, both novels go beyond well-worn narratives that examine the bad treatment of women by men through the prism of power, and into larger more nebulous questions of safety. At one point, Elven’s narrator speaks with an older woman, who is the town’s teacher, Helen Stole, and finds that ‘It was a conversation of agreement, guesses about the water we were all swimming in. I didn’t find myself drawing back from talking about something unsafe, or that I might get wrong.’ In living under the gaze of August, she has come to lose her sense of what being safe might mean, what it means to exist in a conversation of tacit understanding where there are no ulterior motives. For Watts, though her protagonist is hyper-aware of violence against women, having lived with a violent father, seeing horrible stories of women killed by men on the news, and also experiencing a near attack herself, there is no limit to her fear: she finds herself preoccupied by the extremes of weather, by wild animals, and by the possibility of fire.
Both novels delve beyond the patriarchy into territory that demonstrates how profoundly challenging it is to inhabit our present world. A scene in particular sticks out for its rawness: in Watts’s novel, her bloody account of an attempted IUD insertion was gruesome, while articulating so clearly the profound lack of control women often feel about their bodies, particularly in medical circumstances. After struggling to insert the coil because the narrator’s cervix is too narrow, causing her excruciating pain in the meanwhile, the doctor decides not to proceed, but not before saying that this had rarely happened in her twenty-five years of medicine. The narrator feels guilty, as if her body has rejected the process willingly, and ‘felt sorry for screwing up her track record’. This scene is just one of the many in which Watt’s novel espouses the faultline between narratives of personal responsibility and the realities of safety; in a world in which true safety does not really exist, there is only so much one can do to keep oneself safe.
Debut novels are often hard to review – so often things are still emerging, still growing in the writer – but both of these novelists have managed to produce strikingly original and confident work, that doesn’t seek to placate, nor explain the world away. In Watts’s blending of climate change, sexual violence, and the experience of moving through the world in a female body, she details an intricate mesh from which there is no easy escape. Though she may find a more hopeful future away from Australia, her travels will not erase the phenomena she details in the book. For Elven too, there is escape from the village that she finds herself in, but the experience she describes will no doubt cast a long shadow. These sensitive and complex novels give profoundly moving and clear-sighted elucidations of the complexities of living in the twenty-first century.
Words by Katie da Cunha Lewin.
Lucie Elven has written for publications including the London Review of Books, Granta and NOON. The Weak Spot is her first book, and is published by Prototype.
Madeleine Watts is a writer of fiction, stories, and essays. Her writing has been published in The Believer, The White Review, Lithub, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times, Guernica, Meanjin and The Lifted Brow, among others. She is the winner of the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Competition. Her debut novel, The Inland Sea, was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. It was published in the UK by Pushkin Press.
This review essay originally appeared in the Aug / Sep 2021 edition of The London Magazine. To buy that edition, as well as our other back issues, go here.
To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.
You must be logged in to post a comment.