The absence of dialogue – everything is filtered, monologue-style, through the narrator – adds to a building feeling of claustrophobia and uncertainty ... While the story of the stranger who arrives in town and appears to upset the order of things is an old one, Bernstein’s novel feels entirely original; something ancient and unnervingly modern all at once.
Bernstein paints from a palette of dread ... Little actually happens, but, mirroring the protagonist’s daily ramblings through the woods, the novel is made up of philosophical, sometimes rhapsodic meanderings logged in meticulous, measured prose ... This masterly follow-up to her debut acts as a meditation on survival, the dangers of absorbing the narratives of the powerful, and a warning that the self-blame of the oppressed often comes back to bite.
Bernstein’s prose has a studied coolness, all concision and steady flow ... Study for Obedience has a parable’s radiance: the air of the consequential, of a cast who represent us all. Yet it’s too alive a story to rest on obvious messages.
Singular and terrifying ... This compelling book serves as a powerful castigation of those who would draw the lines of society and communal identity so as to narrow diversity, and to punish those who dare to be different.
With so little space to breathe on each page, the reader is utterly transported into Bernstein’s unsettling and unknowable worlds ... Study for Obedience interrogates society’s hostility towards outsiders, but the true difficulty of this compelling book lies in its uncomfortable suggestion that when an outcast gains agency, this agency may not be used for society’s good.
Bernstein’s energies are poured into shaping the distinctive psychology of her narrator and her equally distinctive prose ... As well as a novelist, Bernstein is an academic and poet, and both those vocations can be felt in her prose, for good and ill. She can be precise and startling, but also clunky and evasive.
It puzzles me that it should talk so much about place and history while presenting such blurred versions of both ... The nature of her crisis, withheld like so much else, is revealed as a generational form of survivor’s guilt, but its rapid resolution, and the vagueness of her engagement with its root cause, makes for an oddly frictionless, even privileged, journey into trauma.
There is nevertheless much to admire in this short novel: much fine and evocative descriptive writing, many interesting and intelligent observations ... And yet, while enjoying and admiring many passages, I find myself repeatedly asking "what is it all about?" and finding no satisfying answer ... Likewise, the narrative seems weak to me.
On the surface, it is a simple story – so simple, in fact, that it borders on plotless ... But if the narrative is loose-knit, the atmosphere clots and complicates with every passing sentence ... Bernstein’s chief brilliance in Study For Obedience is the subtlety with which she shifts our perception, from the view of the narrator to that of the townspeople.
