CHECKOUT 19

A woman with a striking resemblance to the author recounts her life as a reader and writer.

In the second section of what is labeled as a novel—but which really reads as something genre-less and unique—the young narrator writes her first story. Inside her secondary school classroom, she has opened her exercise book to the back, where she first attempts to sketch a portrait of her absent male teacher in pen. But, as she draws, suddenly “the line broke off into words, just a few words, then a few words more, and the words set out a story, as if it had been there all along.” The narrator has already spent a childhood immersed in books, and her story, and the enthusiastic response it garners from its subject when he spots it—to her shock—in her exercise book, cements the narrator’s path further into her artistry and its expression through writing. Writing, one could say, is Bennett’s true subject, but even that may be too specific: There is an entire section of the book that retells a Calvino-esque fable that the narrator is supposed to have written in her 20s about a gentleman who acquires a vast library only to realize that the entire collection contains only one single sentence capable of unlocking the totality of the receiver’s perception, even if they cannot read. What Bennett seems after in her shape-shifting novel is less about books—though there are plenty of those, from Annie Ernaux and Roald Dahl to Sylvia Plath and Ann Quin—and more broadly about the true power of the imagination and the lives it enables us to live when our own seem painfully circumscribed by gender, by place, by circumstance.

A kaleidoscopic and ambitious blend of criticism, autofiction, fable, and memoir.