Unfinished Business

I once read that people who’ve had trauma to a particular part of the brain’s right hemisphere can develop a fixation on small, seemingly irrelevant objects. Walking into a room to do some task or other, they’ll get stuck obsessively staring at the door hinges. I don’t remember where I came across this fact—so much of what one reads these days slips into that great jumble of flotsam that drifts about the mind—but it occurred to me more than once while reading Claire-Louise Bennett’s books. Many passages begin in a straightforward way, with the setting of a scene and the promise of dramatic action. But then the story stalls, zeroes in on some incidental detail, and collapses into a mode of reflection that is circular and recursive. An early passage of her debut, Pond (2015), begins, “Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice.” The next four pages digress into aimless musings about a banana’s ideal state of ripeness, the best way to arrange almond flakes on a bowl of porridge, and the fact that oatcakes can also go nicely with coffee—so long as they’re the rough sort. This is before we’ve learned anything at all about the narrator whose consciousness will become the book’s subject and s...