The narrator’s first encounter with A Room with a View, as a schoolgirl, prompts a package holiday to Italy. But it’s clear from the opening 50 pages that she grew up feeling at odds with her background, especially the schoolmates who refuse to read the books issued at the start of term and then “felt no compulsion whatsoever to bring them back”.īooks are presented not as a distraction from 'life' but as a guide and complementĮngaging with literature is presented not as a distraction from “life” but as a guide and complement – a form of action, and a spur to it.

The most traumatic incident occurs during adult life. A sibling goes unmentioned until the final pages, and total clarity about the narrator’s parents’ marital status arrives at a similar point. A description of Charlotte Bartlett, the older cousin in A Room With a View – this is a book full of other books – contains a strong hint of self-comparison: “She has spent a lot of time on her own and certainly that makes a person susceptible to overthinking simple transactions and occasionally losing perspective.” Bennett isn’t much beholden to a psychology of origins. Personal interactions are rare and mostly regrettable. If what we’re being offered is some kind of credo or apologia, it’s one with an unusual emphasis on reading, smoking and lying around.

But whatever challenges the book poses to breezy reading are the product of unswerving fidelity to its own raw spirit. Bennett’s unnamed, 40-ish narrator, raised in south-west England but resident in Ireland, holds forth in fevered, looping, breathless prose, and displays a tendency to travel long and far down the blindest of alleys. C laire-Louise Bennett’s second novel, like her first book, Pond, enacts a quest for quiddity – the syntax that embodies a cast of mind, the phrase that nails a sensation, the narrative structure that feels like life as it is lived or anyway processed.

Claire louise bennett new book