An Obedient Woman

From the very start, the quality of the writing was obvious, which explained why it had been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker. The writing style is so distinctive it took me a page and a half, at least, to sync my reading with this new, novel, original, thoughtful writing.  

The very title of the first chapter already made me smile: “A Beginning A Beginning Again”. One could read this as second guessing oneself; one could read this as a rehearsal before living life; one could read this as wanting to turn the page and begin a new chapter; and all this could be correct for our protagonist. From the start, she is remote, detached, determinedly and studiedly self-effacing. We soon learn that she is thus with many people, even with her lovers: what she calls

My own aborted attempts at intimacy, with men, with women, and all I had ever come away with was the sense of my essential interchangeability (p12).

It is not just people she is detached from, but also places:

…I had felt estranged from most of the settings in which I found myself over the course of my life (p46).

Even the way she puts this is so passive, as if she never actively put herself in any setting, but just found herself placed in those settings. 

Oddly enough, we learn right away that our protagonist is the youngest child of a large family, but far from being the pampered, spoilt darling of the family, she apparently was at everyone’s service. Siblings

…whom I tended from my earliest infancy, before, indeed, I had the power of speech myself and although my motor skills were by then scarcely developed, these, my many siblings, were put in my charge (p2).

The said ‘charge’ seems more like service than management:

I attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion, so that over time, their desires became mine, so that I came to anticipate wants not yet articulated, perhaps not even yet imagined, providing my siblings with the greatest possible succour, filling them up only so they could demand more, always more demands to which I acceded with alacrity and discreet haste, ministering the complex curative draughts prescribed to them by various doctors, serving their meals and snacks, their cigarettes and aperitifs, their nightcaps and their glasses of milk (p2). 

The protagonist further explains that she seemed not to have faith (Judaism) but conformed largely to her people’s traditions. She took on jobs, but was unfairly dismissed though she did not challenge it. She feels herself to have been a misfit everywhere, always, from birth seemingly. She explains her striving to fit in by conforming, pleasing, serving:

I tried to be good. I smiled as I did the bidding of others. I did my work and looked perfectly happy, tidy and unobjectionable, shining, shining the boot. (p26)

The difference between me and anyone else was not that I wanted more to be good, it was not even that I was guiltier, no, it was something rather difficult to place, a surface placidity, with which I moved through the days, plodding, plodding, what certain teachers had in my youth described as a kind of idiot impenetrability… (p26-7).

The author sketches and resketches her protagonist, over and over, giving the reader a very detailed understanding of the make up of this character, of exactly what makes her tick. Not a particularly likeable character, by design, difficult to identify with perhaps, but not difficult to sympathise with.  

When her eldest brother’s marriage breaks down and he asks our protagonist to keep house for him, she accedes at once. However, she soon finds the community where he lives does not accept her, is wary of her, then hostile towards her because they become afraid of her. Unable to speak their language despite managing other languages quite easily, the protagonist is unable to explain or connect verbally, unable to communicate, and is even more estranged from her new neighbourhood. Strange incidents happen with animals and increasingly she is held responsible in some way, although unexplained ways. She lives a solitary life, walking alone, working alone, shunned largely, except by her brother and his dog.  

Discussing this novel, Sarah Bernstein says, “A few years ago, I went to a retrospective of the Portuguese painter Paula Rego’s work. On one wall, they had put up a quote from the artist that said something like: “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time” (The Guardian). Obedient and murderous is a perfect summary of our protagonist – that is exactly how Bernstein creates this singular character.  

The novel comes to an end with the protagonist taking devoted care of her brother, even bathing him and dressing him, as apparently he wanted her to do. She attends to him in a slightly spookily detailed and intimate way, and the novel is very convincing at how it turns passivity and seeming self-effacement, into power and control. (It slightly reminds me of Linden Hills, by Gloria Naylor, with the same compliant, not exactly ill-used but taken-for-granted and uncherished woman protagonist, who ends up turning the tables in the power games.) 

Although I admired the writing, I cannot hand on heart say I really enjoyed the whole novel. It was quite short, and very easy to read, and very much the kind which draws the reader into the inner world and inner mind of the protagonist. But I couldn’t see the point, for many parts of the novel, I couldn’t see what all this was adding up to – even to the end, I still couldn’t see. Could be my lack as a reader, but although quite beautifully executed, I couldn’t appreciate the significance of some of the details or the plot, or the point of it. Maybe it is just a study, rather than a plot. This novel is the kind that just alludes, gestures, rather than gives the reader specifics. Not exactly slippery, but definitely opaque. Am glad to have read it, to have experienced this author’s unique thought processes and writing style, but not entirely sure I found it a satisfying read at the end.