Uprooted by circumstance from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he knows her better than anyone, better than she knows herself. Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept.
In probing these strange and difficult relationships, Bennett displays her characteristic aversion to identikit templates of feeling and desire that distort the real emotional complexity of our attachments and aversions to other people, and especially those people who have most profoundly shaped our inner lives. It is no coincidence that the novel’s most experimental prose appears in its visceral and unerringly convincing depictions of sexual feeling ... The patience of some readers will no doubt be tested by the same incidents and observations being retold multiple times across the book ... If Bennett might seem at first blush a more quietly innovative writer than the novelists with whom she is inevitably compared, this is not to her detriment, but inseparable from the extraordinary subtlety and emotional detail of the psychological portraits her fiction paints.
Now-expected dynamics go slack. The age difference is stretched to such an extreme that Xavier is flawed, but undeniably vulnerable. As a result, the question of who has exploited whom, and of how to treat one another in love (or heartbreak), becomes an open one, even if its answers remain painful and ambiguous ... Bennett’s anger-laced affection carries the novel beyond self-defense or -destruction.
Bennett’s plots, like her sentences, double back, cut themselves off, short-circuit: they always seem in the process of beginning—or beginning again—whether you’re encountering them on the first page or somewhere in the middle ... Bennett’s narratives dramatize all the unexpected shocks and detours of what’s often ultimately uneventful. These are novels of disproportionate letdowns ... Bennett’s narrators do not live so much as thrive in rooms not quite of their own.
