THE APPOINTMENT

A stream-of-consciousness monologue by a woman in a doctor’s office.

At the center of this startling debut novel is a woman in the midst of a medical appointment. The precise nature of that appointment only gradually becomes clear, as hints accumulate, but the woman’s name is never shared. The novel itself takes the form of a stream-of-consciousness monologue the woman delivers, without pause, to a certain Dr. Seligman, who goes on examining her without ever stopping to speak. The content of her monologue varies widely, from a kind of metaphysical riffing to a sexual fixation on Adolf Hitler she may or may not have invented during previous sessions with a therapist she’d been compelled to visit. “The only real conversations you can have in life,” she says at one point, “are those with strangers at night. During the day, there is no anonymity, and if you just start talking to people, you are a freak.” There’s also a former lover she refers to as K. and a family inheritance she’s just received. But her focus seems to be on gender, gender roles, and embodiment—its cruelties and caprices. Volckmer’s prose has a fluid lyricism even—or especially—when it is laced with profanity, which it often is. But her insights often fail to move beyond shock value to achieve real depth. Volckmer’s narrator, it turns out, grew up in Germany, though she now lives in London; Dr. Seligman is Jewish. The narrator turns repeatedly to the subject of the Second World War. She even ends the book by revealing where that family inheritance came from. Unfortunately, that ending, like much else in this intriguing novel, ultimately feels unearned.

Aiming for shock value over profundity, Volckmer glides past the subjects that might have made her novel truly unsettling.