Stevens retreats to the wilderness and writes about it. But she is no naturalist, and her focus is primarily on herself and her determination to be a published writer ... Stevens' descriptions show that she can indeed write. After a slow start — including a month of acclimatization and research in Stanley, the Falklands' capital, which boasts seven pubs but spotty Internet and no cinema – the book takes off when she flies to Bleaker ... One wishes she'd turned her attention outward more, providing additional information about the island's history — and all those penguins and sheep, for starters. Hunger, boredom and disappointment with her novel turn out to be bigger problems than the depression and loneliness she'd feared. Of course, readers of this oddly winning book know that her time wasn't wasted.
As Stevens finally buckles down to write, the memoir moves from travelogue to a cerebral, almost obsessive meditation that begins to fold in on itself...The effect is a dizzying recursion, reflecting the single-mindedness of a writer writing about writing ... Because most of the action is turbulent self-analysis, the book can feel airless and confined at times, locked in by the vast ocean surrounding the island and Stevens’ own mind. But as Stevens wrestles with questions of how (and whether) to turn the grist of life’s happenings into literary material, she paints an honest portrait of writerly neurosis.
Stevens writes with considerable charm and winning honesty, but there is not enough here in the way of a sustained narrative; it is fragmentary, more of a scrapbook than a book. Its target readership is presumably other people who want to write books, but haven’t quite got around to it yet ... Stevens’s whole point, it should be made clear, is that she was foolish and naive to think that going to Bleaker could make her into a novelist. Frustratingly, though, she never subjects the original impulse to any scrutiny. Why did she want to write a novel, when she felt that she had nothing to say? ... it’s a book by somebody who hasn’t quite figured herself out yet; a young writer who should, perhaps, have held off until she was ready to write the novel she had always dreamed of.
As Bleaker House is a memoir and not a novel, you might intimate from the outset that Stevens does not meet her stated goal. It can be tough to enjoy a book you already know the ending to. But failures (plural, as Stevens sees herself having committed many), and the attendant long, mild emotional hangover that seems to define her life, are the raison d’etre of this book ... she doesn’t make any major attempts to universalize her struggles, or to strive for objectiveness. Everything is meaningful, and all meaning leads back to her. In this way, she is a bit like Joan Didion’s heroine in Run River, who tends to imbue meaning into things that maybe she’d be better off dismissing ... The core text, which is the memoir, is interrupted occasionally by snippets of Stevens’s fiction, which varies in quality ... overall, Stevens favors the pensive and blue over the jocular, which is a shame. Though the final chapter of the book is titled 'Punchline,' the reader will be left wanting one.
...[a] delightful literary debut ... Stevens intersperses chapters from the novel-in-progress and, as she readily admits, it is indeed dreadful. The memoir, though, is fresh and spirited ... Lively flashbacks round out a memoir that might have been too tightly focused on desolation and failure. At the end of her island experience, she reports happily, 'I have freed myself of a bad book. I will write a better one now.' This engaging debut fulfills her confident prediction.
