Claire-Louise Bennett
Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett unfolds in the first-person voice of an unnamed working-class, female narrator who gushes out her words in a non-linear stream-of-consciousness torrent. There is no plot. The narrator follows a haphazard format chronicling impressionable events in her life from school to university and beyond.
The narrative rambles, circles back to pervious events, and repeats itself. The style is conversational and recursive with the narrator frequently repeating a series of words and interjecting words of reassurance. There are very few paragraph divisions. A sentence can go on for several lines with no punctuation giving the writing a breathless, exuberant, and hurried quality as if the narrator is rushing to get the words on paper. The language is fluid, almost lyrical. Sentences bubble with detail and specificity while launching into incredible flights of fancy.
The narrator’s interiority is fascinating. Her mind is ever active, never still. She is funny, intelligent, articulate, fixates on the bizarre, has a fertile imagination, and is a prolific reader. Reading is her essential pastime—a means of escape as well as a way to understand herself and others. She engages actively with what she reads. In addition to listing the authors she has read, she will frequently zero in on a scene in one of the books and deconstruct the event and characters, posing questions to the characters, reacting to them, and comparing her reaction when she first read the book with her re-read twenty years later. She relives scenes in novels, blurring the lines between fictional events and her life. She seeks to find herself through books. Not surprisingly, she is a wordsmith and began writing short stories while still in school. Her voice is hypnotic, pulsating with life and energy.
The novel doesn’t tell a story, per se. It is about a writer’s coming-of-age. It is about what we read and the way in which reading threads its way into our lives. But it is more than that. It will not appeal to readers who like structure, plot, and chronology. It’s hard to pinpoint why it succeeds. But succeed it does. It is to Claire-Louise Bennett’s credit that she manages to carry the reader along with her through this hodge-podge of introspection.
If exposure to the interiority of a very fertile, imaginative, inquisitive, intelligent, honest, articulate, and well-read mind of a young woman as she struggles with her identity appeals to you, then you will probably enjoy this novel. More than a story, the novel is a mesmerizing, wild ride to be enjoyed and savored.