Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (2015)

 This one has crystallised something for me. On the one hand, it's quite an interesting attempt to get to the psychological nitty-gritty of a mind working across its life - the task of getting all that into words. On the other, there are lapses in that scheme. On the back cover, a quote (not the blurb) claims that this book is fiction. It certainly doesn't feel like it. It reads like deep-in psychological memoir. Maybe a few odd things have been fictionalised? If so, the main felt thrust is still definitely autobiographical. Bennett is clearly after a picture of the workings of her mind, in waves alternating between the heavily serious and the humorously light. In the serious parts she approaches profundity by expert digging into the spaces between thoughts and the quotidian increments by which they develop, and also reflect of course, the colours of moods. In the lighter parts she seems to have taken on some of the nuances of her Irish home, despite being a Wiltshirewoman. I kept being reminded of the voice of Aisling Bea in these sections, for some reason. They're quite dry, and not at all ostentatious. All of that effort is quietly rewarding, though it rarely reaches the level of poetry. There's a matter-of-fact tendency about it, which lends it the quality of a stare in the face from someone who's quirky. All of which is fine - you feel the seep of the personal surrounding you. But then there are the lapses. Given that everything is so based in psychology, I'm given to trying to find psychological explanations for these. So, why would someone writing like this for the majority of the time find themselves swinging into a dense little pocket of academese: "...the consolidated outcome which is typically produced when a protracted and half-hearted analytical process aggravates the superior auspices of an exasperated subconscious"? Is it an attempt to say "this thought is too difficult to face head-on, I have to hide"? I hope it's not "I'm a deep thinker you know". There are skitterings of this all through the book, and of course they irritate. Perhaps she simply wants us to know that she's sometimes irritating? A "true picture"? If that's the case, there are some other lapses which magnify that impression. These are the swings into freebasing modernism: "When passed betwixt and entered fully, pails were swung and notches considered [......] oh, all things considered and not one mentioned, since all names had turned in and handed back". Just words, and only words, really. They need to better affect each other. Which brings me on to the crystallisation mentioned at the start. We are in the midst at present of a welter of this kind of thing. The best way for me to describe it is to talk about it as a personal experience I think. Since everyone's a writer these days, that has imprimatur. It comes from that feeling you get when you have a friend who's a writer (heavy emphasis). They talk about their writing (ditto). That's not at all completely off-putting, sometimes quite interesting, and some of their insights are valuable. Going to visit them isn't awful to anticipate. You sit down with your cup of tea, near the fire, and get into it. Revelations are exchanged, streams of ideas are followed. But at some point the atmosphere starts to feel a bit leaden. The air is full of condensation. The aforementioned seep of the personal predominates. At the end of the session, they see you out, and you're exposed to the elements as you set out for home. You realise you've been ensouped in what I call Wet Air. The Wet Air impression is made of two things: the intensely personal project ("my writing") and of course the contrast with Dry Air. Here in the early 21st century we seem to have a deep predilection for staying in Wet Air, effectively our mania for memoir, and consistent hunger for trying to dig further into personal revelation in writing. It's the great project of the times. Whereas, for example, a piece from 1934, or 1888, is pretty well pure Dry Air. One doesn't feel mired in the reading. We seem to have made a temple of the self in writing nowadays. Writing is therapy, and about the writer. It's only incidentally for the reader. Perhaps it's a stage we have to go through. The advent of psychology culturally working its way - now, which is it? - into or out of our systems? It seems to have been going on since the first mutterings of modernism in the late 19th century; I'm wondering if this period is its last gasp, or, conversely, its final overcoming/domination of "the narrative", for the moment at least. But there's no denying that Wet Air, once you name it, becomes hugely recognisable. It's an interesting place to visit, always an experiment with some payoffs, but the lasting impression is of wondering how much further it can go, and when the mode will change up. And a complementary impression of what has been lost in all that Dry Air of former times.