“Invisible Bird”
by Claire-Louise Bennett
from the May 30, 2022 issue of The New Yorker
Claire-Louise Bennett made waves when her debut novel (or, as I understand, something that might be a novel) Pond came out in 2015, and her follow-up, Checkout 19, came out a couple of months ago to more acclaim. Ever since Pond came out I’ve wanted to get my hands on it and read it, so I’m glad that she’s got “Invisible Bird” in The New Yorker this week so I can dip my toe in!
Here is how it starts:
After finishing my degree I would have liked to have stayed on in London. Despite owing considerable arrears on my rent I somehow assumed that I could carry on living in my high-ceilinged bedsit near the common for as long as I liked. I’d done a lot of work in the garden, two gardens really—the landlords owned two semis at the top of a smart tree-lined avenue. The semis were next to each other, but separate, joined to other houses, though the gardens at the back were side by side with no boundary between them, so it was quite admissible to think of them as a single sprawling entity. Especially when you were down there, hauling cables of bindweed that began in one corner and tapered off many solid yards later in the shady depths of another.
No idea what kind of story this is starting! And I’m excited by that!
Please feel free to leave your thoughts and comments below.
I’m not a New Yorker subscriber so I’ll miss this one, however ’Pond’ was brilliant & ‘’Checkout-19’ even better, there was also a short publication by Juxta Press where the threads germinate as well. A wonder writer, enjoy.
Misanthropy, debt, gardening — what’s not to like? Bennett seems to be taking a swing at Female Orwell or something to that extent (and Down and Out in Paris and London makes a timely appearance), a chronicle in the life of a quasi-homeless (or briefly homeless for an interim) woman that might also call to mind for some the recent plaudit-receiving film Nomadland by Chloe Zhao.
Mental illness (anxiety, neurosis, nervous agitation) certainly owes a debt to Virginia Woolf, especially given the contrast of London and an “unremarkable English town.”
The directionless cigarette-smoking flaneur, one who likes classical music and “mercifully plain” decor even, is a specialty of Bennett’s, though Nell Zink and even Sally Rooney feel like contemporaries worth mentioning here — the main character’s an artisanal maker of sorts, after all, and a couple’s trip to Dublin to interact with another couple, composed of the young and directionless, ensues.
The dabblings in alcohol and low-level criminality also bring to mind the work of A.L. Kennedy. And of course Bennett drops Proust directly into her narrator’s musings as well. The entendre of the title (“bird” as woman in British slang, driven home as she penetrates a purportedly male-only soup kitchen) is kinda fun. The Last Tango in Paris soundtrack is an important cultural marker that exposes the narrator’s somewhat romanticized lionization of her own poverty as a sort of aspirant bohemian engaged in embracing some temporary scoffing-at-the-normies-and-their-status-quo squalor before settling into an actual indoor home. The statue-thing busking act she does with her fella is literally a mimesis of romance. A cool moment in the story, well-placed and well-rendered.
“The dead end jobs and not-quite-real-boyfriends of my youth” feels like a possible alternate title here, and the story’s plotlessness didn’t really bother me. Overall, there’s a Mike Leigh quality to the liminal lower-class vibe. The ending is resonant. There’s a bit of a stink of autofiction throughout, but that might just be my distaste for that genre, though I do think it infects the world here a smidge and for the worse.
Bennett captures the vibe she’s going for, and it is more “vibe” than “story” here, but it’s a thumbs up overall because I think it succeeds in crafting the sort of ennui of a certain youthful period quite well.
I am drawn to Claire-Louis Bennett because she seems to explore the act of thinking in a highly reflexive fashion. Many novels have characters who are thinking about something–trying to figure something out or decide what to do or solve a crime–but here it’s the literal act itself–the way we create paradoxes (such as that a quiet street is quieter when one sign squeaks at night) or observe the world. She seems here, and in Checkout 19 which is loved, to be writing about thinking, about imagination, about creativity as subjects themselves.
When she writes “Quite often I’d stand in one of the flat’s two rooms, somehow gazing inward at that amorphous space between the temples on either side of my head…” it does lead to thinking about the flat and her reason to be there. It is narrativized so to speak, but it’s also tipping her hat that this amorphous space is her real subject.
All of the bohemian intertexts that Sean points out add a different, interesting dimension to the story which shows how two readers can fixated differently on work of this quality.
I meant “Checkout 19 which I loved”
Kudos to Sean and Ken for their insights. Story grabbed my attention