THREE

Quin’s second novel (originally published in 1966) traces the fates of Ruth and Leonard as they settle back into binary monogamy after the death of their mysterious lodger, S, who had briefly been their invigorating third.

Ruth and Leonard are quintessential examples of the British midcentury bourgeois. Leonard works somewhat provisionally as a translator, but his real passion seems to be breeding orchids in his inherited weekend home somewhere on the coast of England. Ruth would like to be pregnant but is consistently uninterested in Leonard’s sexual advances. She channels all her eros into games she plays with her own image—considering her reflection in the mirror, trying on outfits, rearranging her body in various dissatisfied poses around their home. The couple is firmly settled in the habits of their middle age, traveling back and forth from their flat in town to Grey House by the coast, unable to break out of the stifling, claustrophobic conformity of their bourgeois repression, surrounded by the inherited clutter of the lives that came before their own. At the novel’s opening, Ruth and Leonard are also in mourning. The spring before, S had become their boarder to convalesce from an ailment that turns out to have been the aftereffects of an abortion. Enigmatic, playful, and keenly observant, S quickly became a stimulating third in their stultified lives, a person whom both Ruth and Leonard desire and confide in. When S disappears in a boating accident that may have been a suicide, Ruth and Leonard are left to pore obsessively through the journals and audio recordings she left behind. In searching for the truth about S’s death, they find instead a devastating clarity about the paucity of their own lives. Quin was a master stylist and a restless innovator in her own work. True to her inimitable form, the book develops its own method of overlapping language as Ruth and Leonard speak over and around each other, interrupted by poetically lineated sections where S’s recorded voice is represented alongside the blank space of her silences. The effect will likely make for heavy wading for many readers but results in an overheated, overcrowded novel that both dazzles and devastates in its uniquely rendered but nonetheless ubiquitous truths.

Further evidence to cement Quin’s reputation as one of the most innovative, and most underappreciated, voices of her time.