“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review
"Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine
Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known.
Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.
The never-named narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond is a failed academic. It's one of the few details we get about her life. She washed out of academia and responded by renting a small cottage in the Irish countryside. This book isn't really a novel, nor is it a collection of short stories...it's more a series of loosely connected vignettes. Our narrator observes and speculates on the scenery and life around her, and (less frequently) thinks about her past. It's very non-linear and free association-y. There's really no plot, as it were, to describe for this book, so I'll just get right to the review part.
The writing is gorgeous, almost poetic. There's wit and keen, delightful observations. But ultimately, this was a frustrating reading experience. I've said before that I tend to think about books as having three primary characteristics: prose quality, character development, and plot. A bad book does none of these things well. A great book does all of them well. And there's the in-between...usually, I find that two-of-three makes a good book but one-of-three makes a frustrating one. When one quality really shines, it makes lacks in the others seem more glaring. And these are obviously all weighted differently for different people. For me, their importance more or less corresponds with the way I've listed them above, in that even a book that has an interesting plot and characters fails for me if the writing is clunky. So while the writing here is lovely, it's the characters and plot that let it down.
Like I said before, there's not really much in the way of "plot" to speak of, but what's most annoying is that even though this book is the inner life of one person, she remains at a remove from the reader. We see what she thinks, but we know very little about her, about what drives her, about what she wants and needs. And it feels like a deliberate choice to make her such a cipher, but it means that it's really hard to connect with the book in any meaningful way beyond admiration for Bennett's technical skill in crafting language. It's not bad, but it's also not good (the consensus at the book club I read this for was that we felt positively about it, but not strongly, and some people couldn't make themselves finish it even though it's quite short). So while I don't feel like it's not worth reading, if you're so inclined, if you're looking for a story about a young woman who's a failed academic trying to figure out her life, I'd recommend 2017's Chemistry, which felt similar to me but was more satisfying.
