In fiction, one of the surprise hits of 2014 was Eimear McBride's virtuosic "A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing," a novel whose dizzying, disorienting prose heralded an original new voice. Two years on and that book's success looks set to be replicated by another first novel by a young female writer. Like McBride's debut, Claire-Louise Bennett's "Pond" is set in Ireland, narrated by an unnamed woman, is rich in stylistic inventiveness and shaded with strange, sensuous and exhilarating moods and textures.
The book is divided into 20 sections but it is no short story collection. It is hard to categorize each section: They are neither linked tales nor chronological episodes. Some unfold in 20 or so pages, others constitute only a handful of lines.
Then there is the difficulty of determining what the book is "about," or at least what Bennett's intentions are. After a brief, impressionistic opener involving her narrator remembering an incident when she was a little girl, Bennett moves on and expands in her second section, "Morning, Noon & Night." The narrator reveals herself to be semi-solitary, wryly ruminative and fully immersed in her life. Here and elsewhere she describes her days in her cottage, how she putters in her garden and occasionally ventures out to see friends or meet men.
So far, so unremarkable. But Bennett's narrator has a busy mind that skips from one topic to another with little warning. One minute she is telling us about the vegetables she grows, the next about her academic career. She gets sidetracked, confused and throws in extraneous detail. Her language perks up and breaks down. She is a creature of habit with a beguiling turn of phrase (porridge, eaten too late in the day, "will feel vertical and oppressive, like a gloomy repast from the underworld").
All of this is honed and developed in "The Big Day." The narrator waits at a neighbor's house — for what, she can't recall — and humdrum objects, photographs or wayward thoughts trigger meditations on quotidian experiences or re-enact past drama. Drinking straws resemble slides in a water park, which takes her back to a German vacation. In "Control Knobs" her cooker sparks reminiscences; in "The Deepest Sea" it is an ink cartridge. While cleaning out the grate in "A Little Before Seven" she is reminded of an old relationship and the level of drunkenness needed to sustain it.
Bennett's short, shard-like sections resemble prose poems, but one or two, such as the ode to tomato purée, are too whimsical to leave a mark. Also, some of the longer pieces come clogged with gloopy formulations.
However, for the most part we are captivated by the narrator's sharply illuminated interior reality and her lyrical depictions of the nature around her. Boldly defying convention, "Pond" is an exceptional debut with beautiful hidden depths.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Daily Beast. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
