Ashworth

Novels about missing people seem to be a genre in themselves. So many crime novels that I read about (and never read) are about missing children or missing women – massive turn-offs for me, partly because I’ve heard that they tend towards the gruesome, but also because I am fully Team Staunch Book Prize. Which is one of the reasons why I was keen to read Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth (2021 – a new novel!!) – because here it is the man who goes missing. Also it’s a novel by Jenn Ashworth, and I always want to read those.

The narrator is Laurie, a cleaner at a university who has been married to Mark for some time – they initially met at a wedding, where a psychic called Joyce thought they were already a couple. The novel opens with an ordinary scene of the two waking up together – talking about a broken curtain, about staying up too late. Unspokenly considering morning sex, and unspokenly deciding against. Getting up to make a cup of tea.

It’s hard to know how other couples live their lives, but all of this had become utterly ordinary for us. I told the police as much, later. I left for work while he was still in the shower. I don’t know what he was wearing that day. No, he hadn;t seemed unusual in any way that morning. 

The officers – they sent two, a man and a woman who both refused a hot drink and made notes on a tablet instead of in a notebook – seemed frustrated by the fact that no matter how they phrased their questions I had nothing to add – no suspicious or out-of-the-ordinary behaviour on his part – to my account. I didn’t tell them I was pissed off with him, but I am telling you now.

One of the unsettling things about the novel is that we don’t know who’s the ‘you’ that Laurie is speaking to, or even when the ‘now’ is. Mark might not have displayed any out-of-the-ordinary behaviour, but Laurie certainly does. Her emotional reaction to Mark disappearing is subdued. She is speaking directly to us, but holding back from any outburst or breakdown. She doesn’t tell people that Mark has gone missing – whenever his mother Mavis phones, she says he’s in the shower or otherwise unavailable. It’s several weeks before Laurie even contacts the police.

This is nothing as conventional as the unreliable narrator – except inasmuch as every narrator is unreliable. Laurie isn’t really connected with her own thoughts on and responses to this seismic event. Ghosted reminded me often of My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq. Laurie doesn’t unravel in the same way as that wife-of-a-missing-husband, but there is the same eerie inability to conform to anticipated reactions. Laurie certainly isn’t ignoring Mark’s disappearance, but her thoughts about it always skirt around the conventional. Everything in this novel skirts around the conventional, in fact. There is no desperate hunt to find him – but rather a sort of dispassionate paranoia and anxiety.

I know now the reason I was so reluctant to tell her that Mark had left me was because I feared she would blame me for driving her adored son away. Whatever made idea was currently gripping him and sending him across the country, it would be me that had planted it in his mind. My responsibility, at least, to pluck it out before it could take root. My task, as his lover and wife, to make home a sanctuary and a paradise that he could not bear to leave. If he’d found another woman – someone better groomed, more sympathetic, more likely to store colanders in the correct cupboard – well, he couldn’t be blamed for that. And underneath all that, the fear: once Mavis had decided this was all her fault, she would leave me too.

Mark’s isn’t the only disappearance in the novel. A second plot is Laurie’s relationship with her father, whose mind is gradually disappearing – and also his cleaner-turned-helper Olena, who is closer with him than Laurie is. Ashworth shows the shifting and sad relationship between father and daughter with the same subtle complexity that she does everything, pieced together with memories of the past and anxieties about the future. Other threads are Laurie’s obsession with a young girl who was murdered years earlier, tracking down psychic Joyce, and some money that Olena might have stolen. All are wound together naturally and cleverly, never quite going in the way you expect.

And that’s the brilliance of Ashworth’s writing, I think. Her novels are often unsettling and odd, but every moment is plausible. As soon as it happens, it feels exactly right, even as she resists the natural next steps and anticipated reactions. Overall, Ghosted leans towards the ambiguous and uncertain, but in a way that makes any alternative pathway from her initial premise feel unnatural and stilted. It’s another excellent and consistently interesting success from one of the few still-publishing authors whose books I will always look out for.

Sometimes you read a book so unusual, so defying of genre, that it’s hard to know what to write about it. Something that is experimental with language and format without ever losing its tethering to the ground. All I can say is that Notes Made While Falling (2019) is special, and reading was an extraordinary experience.

Well, that’s not all I can say, because I’m going to keep writing this. Notes Made While Falling is non-fiction, and that’s about as comfortable as I feel putting it into a box – and even that might be too confining. It is memoir and essay and literary criticism and everything in between.

At its starting point, and the point to which it always returns, is a traumatic childbirth. Ashworth started haemorrhaging during a caesarean and was conscious but immobile for part of the operation. She heard her own blood falling onto the floor. This is an image that recurs throughout the book and with which she was clearly obsessed – it haunted her sleepless, alcohol-filled nights; it became all sorts of other images of falling. The first section of this book is a vivid, vicious, vital exploration of her own illness – a dizzying mix of clear-eyed retrospective and blurred lack of self-awareness, somehow coming together into a brilliantly written whole. She uses ‘/’ mid sentence to give two alternative sections of sentences – places where both versions are true at the same time, and a single sentence can’t hold the multiplicity of reality. I think the whole book, but especially this part, is about the fragility of narrative and the inevitability of narrative.

From here, Notes Made While Falling is a wide-ranging journey. Ashworth writes a lot about her upbringing in a strict Mormon church. (My own upbringing in a faith-filled household was nothing but a blessing, and I thought I might be irritated by another memoir that refuses to see any good in people of faith, but her church was certainly not my church, and her life had many more restrictions.) She writes about her confusing, violent father, and the time she spent in care. A lot of this comes in the form of a short story that she once wrote and which she is now elucidating and critiquing. Again, the outlines are blurred. Certainty is always something Ashworth resists, or cannot pin-point.

It’s all so original. A chapter ostensibly on why she doesn’t like King Lear is really about fathers and memories. Elsewhere she takes us from Agatha Christie to Freud to the Bulger trial to Astrid Lingren and every step makes sense, so we only know how strange the journey has been when we get to the end.

Writing about illness naturally makes the Woolf fan think about On Being Ill, and Woolf is certainly in the mix. This section is about her, and shows the sort of fluid, thought-provoking style that Ashworth brings to the book.

It is significant that Woolf foregrounds the difficulties experienced by the woman writer. The wounded woman writer, which of course she was. It is significant because wounded is a tricky thing for any woman to admit to being. Not least because any time a woman utters a sentence about her own experience, she becomes a kind of terrorist and there’s an army out there waiting to strike her down. Some days it feels like writing truthfully about her own life is the most subversive thing a woman can do. But more specifically there is also the sense that in uttering the truth of painful experience she is letting the side down and embracing the straightjacket [sic] and the hysteric’s sickbed a little too easily. That she is first with her body then again with her writing (that is, with her hands) providing hysterical ladies (the story railroads us all towards it conclusion: all they need is a good fucking, even when they’ve already been fucked). More nicely: women writing about illness risk equating womanhood itself with illness.

It’s such a rich passage, and practically every page is as rich. Incidentally, I’ve put ‘[sic]’ in there but I’m very ready to believe that the misspelling ‘straightjacket’ was intentional.

I’ve read a couple of Ashworth’s novels, and was particularly impressed by her most recent, Fell. This feels in some ways like a logical step from that, since Fell was also about illness and uncertainty and all sorts of other things. But this is a different creature, and – excellent novelist though she is – it feels like Ashworth has found her metier with Notes Made While Falling. It was a privilege to read it.

It’s time to start pointing you over to my Shiny New Books reviews! (And, while you’re there, do take some time exploring all the reviews and features on offer.) This one is the latest novel by Jenn Ashworth, whom I met at a bloggers-meet-authors event a few years ago, where we had a lovely chat and bonded over being the only non-Londoners there. Fell is a really wonderful, unusual, and sensitive novel. Read all my thoughts over at SNB; here’s the beginning of my review:

The title of Jenn Ashworth’s fourth novel could mean any number of things – or, indeed, all of them. The first two that come to mind, as you start reading the novel, are the felling of a tree (the fate of two sycamores is in discussion) and falling to earth – because our narrators, we learn fairly quickly, are dead. Not in a Lovely Bones talking-from-Heaven style, but in an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-anxious away.

I’ve spent a long weekend at home in Somerset with the rest of my family, doing restful things and enjoying the countryside (though the train journey home was a nightmare – took eight hours from door to door, and is two and half hours in a car…) When I’m on trains, I try to catch up with some of my non-university reading, especially things I’ve promised that I’ll read for months and months…

But A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth isn’t a review book (plenty of those waiting, looking at me impatiently) but one my housemate Mel lent me a while ago. (She first heard about Jenn when Jenn submitted work to Mel’s flash fiction website, The Pygmy Giant. Go have an explore.) Oh, and it came second in the Guardian’s ‘Not The Booker’ prize. A Kind of Intimacy is a novel from earlier this year, about Annie – ‘morbidly obese, lonely, and hopeful’, says the blurb, though I should add that the blurb gives away most of the plot and should be ignored before reading. Annie moves to a new neighbourhood, with just Mr. Tibs the cat for company. As she’s bringing the boxes in, she meets her next door neighbour Neil, who initially mistakes her for the removal man. She recognises him, but can’t place where they’d previously met.

Annie senses a closeness between herself and Neil, not hindered by his partner Lucy, who is everything Annie is not: very young, thin, beautiful. But Annie realises that she has to keep an eye on Lucy, if she is going to rescue Neil from his current life, and set one up with him. These attempts are increasingly bizarre, but all very just in Annie’s mind. She overhears Lucy insulting her – so she pushes handfuls of garbage through her letterbox. She digs up Lucy’s primroses; she even takes washing from Lucy’s washing line.

The novel is from Annie’s first-person perspective, and so Ashworth deftly gives us a viewpoint of somebody who is unbalanced, but is unaware of it – the narrative manages to tread the line between internal logic (all Annie’s actions make sense to her) and insanity (the reader slowly realises how unhinged Annie is.) But unhinged isn’t perhaps the right word – because we also see, in flashbacks, what events have led to Annie’s current state – her relationship with her parents, for example, and her first boyfriend. There is the ongoing questions as to whether or not she has a husband and child – she tells some people that she does, and some that she doesn’t.

It is no easy task, showing us Annie’s perspective, while still allowing the reader to understand how limited and delusional that perspective can be. She notices everything – ‘Neil shuffled, took his hands out of his pockets, and sat down next to me on the couch. Our knees pointed at each other, which I knew from my reading about non-verbal communication was a good sign.’ – but not the motives behind the actions. She interprets Neil’s glances with Lucy as trying to let her down gently; her neighbour laughing at her as anxious concern. The reader is able to see the truth through the mist of Annie’s misconceptions – though there is still often a haze, as Annie’s most bizarre actions are only mentioned in passing, by others. A Kind of Intimacy has a lot in common with Lisa Glass’s excellent (though very disturbing) book Prince Rupert’s Teardrop, which I reviewed here – Ashworth’s novel is perhaps not quite so clever as Glass’s, nor so unsettling, but that doesn’t stop it being pretty clever and unsettling anyway.

As a character study, and as an experiment in how narrative can be used to reveal and conceal, A Kind of Intimacy is a triumph – that the novel is also fast-paced, compelling, and of escalating intensity makes it exceptional. Perhaps not my normal fare, and not gentle or relaxing, but it’s always good to jolt myself with this sort of novel – I recommend you give it a go yourself.