Tennant-Moore—in this antidote to Fifty Shades of Grey—has managed to do a difficult thing: write frankly about female desire, and unfussily capture the emotional and visceral confusion of pleasure being contingent upon another human.
The novel is a multi-layered exploration of sexuality and female desire. It’s a disarming and sharply-rendered portrait of a woman attempting to wrangle some sense of meaning from a world filled with lust and rage.
It’s to Tennant-Moore’s credit that Elsie recognizes the predictable nature of her voyage to self-discovery even while she takes pride in its results: 'I am aware of the cliché of my journey and so have diminished in the retelling of it even the parts that did truly change me.' Unfortunately, readers may have packed their bags and left long before Elsie gets there.
Tennant-Moore seems to be on a welcome and worthy mission to offer a corrective to the proliferating accounts of young male bodies that mark the novels of 'all the sad young literary men'. However, she misses an important opportunity to start a bigger conversation about the ways they indulge in navel-gazing on young male sexuality. Instead, she seems to try to keep up with these boys — or to best them — by attempting to give shock value to Elsie’s sexual exploits and frankness. As a result, she undermines her own efforts.
The novel glows with the malaise of the Bush years ... Although Elsie makes rash decisions, her thoughts about intimacy and desire are searching and considered, and Tennant-Moore depicts even her most startling fantasies with analytical froideur.
Despite the novel’s occasional tendency to wander into self-indulgent terrain with slow, meandering passages that mimic Elsie’s own stagnation, this is an often entertaining and thought-provoking debut. Wreck and Order is not perfect, but it leaves the reader ready to hear more from Tennant-Moore and her distinctive voice.
