The subtle ways authority warps individual autonomy is central to Lucie Elven’s debut novel The Weak Spot ... Elven’s prose has a hidden, still-waters-run-deep quality, spare and reminiscent of fable, yet the story itself is grounded in concrete human situations. The narrative is slow-building, unsettling in the best way, but Elven’s sentences are swift and punctured with wonderfully odd phrasing, dry humor, and elegant insights ... A reader looking for a traditional character arc with a confident narrator that takes them by the arm and tromps them through the story may be somewhat disappointed. The Weak Spot is more interested in the invisible forces that guide our ways of being in the world ... Elven shows the slipperiness of self and narrative—how easily we buy into other people’s stories, how many of us choose to live inside another person’s destructive narrative rather than forging a path for ourselves.
An elegant and captivating fable. It explores our hunger for answers to the nutty issues in our life, things just beyond our grasp ... The Weak Spot is about human frailty and the exploitation that comes with ambition, power and patriarchy. [A] claustrophobic, slightly
eccentric tale.
For the characters in Lucie Elven’s debut novel The Weak Spot, however, small moments of manipulation amount to something rather more sinister ... Insecurities, penchants and fears become means of exploitation in a novel that uncovers what it is to have our 'weak spot' used against us. Delightfully equivocal and quietly unnerving, the book offers a striking allegory of the power of information in the modern world, and our all-too-human instinct to trust those in positions of authority ... Much like in her short stories, published in NOON, the London Review of Books and Granta, Elven’s prose is sharp yet reads like a heavy dream. The book switches between descriptions of modern medicine and impressions of European antiquity. We are plunged into the intricate lives of the townspeople, without any concrete sense of time or place. This foggy setting plays into the unsettling nature of the book to establish a contemporary story with fable-like charm. The Weak Spot certainly feels didactic, warning of the dangers of human nature like any great fable would ... Elven writes the apprentice’s inner monologue with considerable craft: the more we learn about the mysterious goings on in town, the more we lose touch with her character ... The Weak Spot’s greatest triumph is showing the gradual process of personal and social change. Elven shows that it is not something that happens overnight – it is a slow and creeping creature that only becomes visible once fully grown. Like any well-crafted mystery, the book begins with an ominous sense of foreboding and culminates in an eventual twist, which seems inevitable, if not obvious. As debuts go, The Weak Spot is so refreshingly elusive, it demands to be read a second time to fully unravel the intricate commentary Elven is making on the many moving parts of our modern world.
While nothing outwardly speculative occurs in The Weak Spot, early on our narrator is told about the beast that stalked the region ... The creature never makes an appearance, but that tale, quite cleverly, sets a dark, fairytale-like tone for the rest of the novella. Added to this is Elven’s refined prose, saturated with imagery, which lends the story a claustrophobic atmosphere. Simply put, The Weak Spot is a powerful and discomfiting tale about power and populism ... The Weak Spot is a strong debut, a contemporary fable, beautifully written, that feels very much of the moment.
There is a weightless quality to this story that makes the stakes seem not only low, but inconsequential. Why should readers care about this narrator? Why should we care about August Malone? Elven hints at an answer but doesn’t, in the end, deliver. Vagaries of setting and plot pile up as this story seems to go nowhere.
Elven’s crisp and creepy debut looks at the transactional nature of relationships and the subtle signals of power at play in small-town dynamics ... Very short chapters focus on the mundane interactions of everyday life, which in Elven’s hands become significant and sometimes ominous, despite (or because of) the heroine’s cool narrative voice. Plot developments are small, except for Mr. Malone’s campaign for mayor that dominates much of the novel, but the arch, skillfully polished prose keeps things intriguing. Elven successfully channels the magic and mood of Kafka’s fables.
