“You should listen to me,” is the implicit argument being made by a narrator to the reader, especially a narrator who speaks as intimately and as conscious of the reader as the one in Study for Obedience. “Why?” is the natural question for the reader to ask back, and this question drew me through the first couple chapters. The narrator’s story-telling — a mix of far too much detail mixed with vague handwaving or elided rationale — quickly clued me in to her unreliability, but what story was she trying to tell me, and what really happened?
For a little while, I thought the narrator was like Amy, from Gone Girl, making herself out to be the perfect victim, while secretly carrying out a nefarious plot. The narrator is so meek, so self-deprecating, so unworthy of interest that I thought for sure it was a cover. But this aspect of her nature seems indeed to be true. The narrator is a victim of abuse, raised to serve her older siblings. She may also have been sexually assaulted (in a characteristic linguistic loophole, she tells us that there had been “no assault that had been reported, investigated, and brought to trial”). Now middle-aged, she leaves her life in the city to be a house-keeper for her brother in a tiny, traditional, rural village. She finds ways to make her devotion to her brother a matter of exercising her own agency. It’s a character and setting alien to me: very conservative, hierarchical, punishing, sexist, and so internalized that the character sees virtue in the ways she subsumes herself to these values.
The narrator is Jewish, although that word and its cognates never appear. Her identity can be pieced together from the stereotypes others apply to her and from the shape of the vague history she tells of her ancestors (“an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits.”), who fled the land in which she now lives during the Holocaust. She shares the grinding loneliness and fear of moving through the world as a Jewish woman. The villagers treat her as an outsider, no matter how much she tries to integrate. They accuse her of witchcraft, responsible for the many strange events that occurred after her arrival.
But the reader has to wonder about the actual cause of all these events. The narrator emphasizes to us the improbability of so many rare events coinciding:
Accepting that my arrival had coincided with the madness and necessary extermination of the cows, the demise of the ewe and her nearly born lamb, the dog’s phantom pregnancy, the containment of domestic fowl, a potato blight which I have so far neglected to mention – acknowledging that all these events had occurred in quick succession more or less upon my arrival in the place, and admitting that not one of these things had happened singly in recent memory, that the town and surrounding areas had actually lived through a blessed and prosperous fifty years, and that these unfortunate events had still less ever, in recorded history, happened simultaneously – granting all this, yes, still, it was difficult for me to accept the bad feeling of the townspeople.
There is also the unignorable fact that the narrator — for motives she does not reveal to us — wove together “herbs and grasses I knew so well by sight though not by name” into “shapes of some significance to me”, and then dropped them off in the middle of the night to select locations in the village, murmuring “quiet words of devotion” and then nervously waited for the effects to take place. The narrator’s value system is far from sympathetic. She works without scruples for a corporate law firm set on ruining the environment and the lives of those who try to protect it. She sides with her brother against the employees who accuse him of sexual harassment. Are her beliefs just the result of her childhood conditioning, unquestioning service to those higher up the hierarchy? Or is she a bad person?
At this point, we should consider the epigraph the author chose for the novel: “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.” Now the reader is placed in a predicament: is the narrator innocent of all the strange occurrences, merely a worn-down victim of abuse, obedient to a fault, mistreated by her antisemitic neighbours? If so, how do we explain these strange events and the narrator’s woven dolls? Or, is the narrator murderous? Did she cause (some portion of) these events? If so, the reader must accept the existence of magic, and is placed in uncomfortable company with the narrator’s antisemitic neighbours. (And if we choose this answer, the meek, unworthy neighbour recalls Gone Girl’s murderous heroine after all.)
The book ends with a surreal confrontation — for some reason, the townsfolk are all wearing matching white tracksuits when they summon her about the woven dolls — and although it is unclear what exactly transpired, the narrator demands her right to live, as a survivor of horrific violence against her people as well as someone now personally implicated. She receives it. The novel ends with her caring for her sorrysack brother in their home: “I am living, I claim my right to live.”
This novel wasn’t for me. I want to grasp events in all their spatiotemporal particularity; the narrator sands down all the details of history and geography until the village could be anywhere in Eastern Europe, and until its history of Jewish oppression becomes myth-like. I turn to novels to understand the human experience, but despite hearing this narrator’s entire story, I still have no idea who she is; there is no cathartic moment where truths and lies are revealed. The author invites us to contemplate these ambiguities, but rather than finding the result to be profound, I thought it made the treatment of these serious topics superficial, empty.
No comments:
Post a Comment