Guest Review: Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett
Claire-Louise Bennett’s writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, the New York Times, Vogue Italia, and gorse. Her first book, Pond, a collection of short stories, was published in 2015 and follows a loose thread of narration, featuring one woman throughout, revealing the writer’s playful style and formal experimentation. Subtitled ‘A Novel’, Checkout 19 emphasizes Bennett's formally unique style seen in Pond as one that blends memoir, fiction, literary criticism, and essay to meditate on memory, trauma, womanhood, literature, and the mundane moment. The story follows one unnamed narrator’s distinctive voice as she ponders her relationship to the books that have filled her life, to terrible boyfriends, to the girl who lent her a pair of knickers when her period catches her out at school. The narrative shifts back and forth in time, and biographical details are surprisingly scant considering how intimate a portrait of the narrator’s life is otherwise painted.
The first of the seven chapters situates the reader in a memory, with the narrator speaking as though accompanied by another version of herself, and offers a taut but humorously-accurate observation of the act of reading itself. The unnamed narrator asserts that “When we turn the page we are born again”, sharpening our awareness of our interaction with the book as an object, with the narrator, and with memory. Perspective is especially intriguing as the narration shifts between first-, second-, and third-person narrative voice throughout Checkout 19, and breathless, lightly-punctuated sentences immerse the reader in the looping, winding writing style that Bennett employs so masterfully. While this slippage of perspectives might sound off-putting, it enriches the text by introducing different dimensions and questions as to who the “we” is both at the beginning and later on in the book. The story of Tarquin Superbus, for example, features both the “I” of the character himself in the events of his own narrative but also the “I” of the writer, our narrator, as she crafts and constructs the eccentric man bit by bit.
Repetition and callbacks are so valuable to the cohesion of this narrative, especially where it loosens at its formal edges between künstlerroman (a novel that reflects on the artist’s growth to maturity), lit crit, travel writing, and fictional narrative. Recurring words like “crepuscular” and “chiaroscuro” make the text so warm and inviting, while long, luxuriating paragraphs detailing the sumptuous delights enjoyed by the narrator’s own invented character, Tarquin Superbus, entice the reader further into this looping, overlaying story about books, about difficulty, and about navigating young adulthood. This envelopes the reader in meandering but cohesively-sound meditations on place, time, and their relationship to one another.
We are reassured by the narrator’s frequent affirmations of “I know” or “knew then”, even as the narrator seems to be unsettled that others might know “a great deal more” about “important books” and, therefore, more about life than she does. Knowledge and its acquisition are examined through the lens of the narrator’s own reading history that interrogates the lessons, if any, imparted by writers like Anna Kavan, Anaïs Nin, Italo Calvino, and Ezra Pound. The intimacy and joy of reading are at the heart of these explorations, however, which stops the text from veering into the utter self-indulgence you might expect from the checklist-like quality of the chapters that are oriented around other books.
Literary survey sees the narrator parsing experience as a young person. Later, those books so crucial to the narrator’s formative years continue to generate ideas worthy of reexamination into her adult life in London, Ireland, and beyond. It is a book steeped in literary allusion that deepens the folds of this narrative, but the narrator’s acute self-consciousness (“I hadn’t yet read…”) prevents this from being prohibitively lofty or inaccessible. Instead, the narrator takes the reader by the hand through Vienna, the west of Ireland, and bustling London and generously provides space for you to interact with this intertextual exploration with cups of “sugary mint tea” or “Earl Grey with Baileys in it”.
Strained relationships with men (fictional, factual, and creative) pepper this book: the pang of unrequited, intense adolescent attraction to her teacher, the influence questionable boyfriends have on her reading list, and the concerted effort made to move away from men like Shakespeare, Forster, and Perec towards women like Ginzburg, Lessing, and Lispector. Throughout it all, the narrator uses books to make sense of herself, of trauma, and of troubling situations with strange and familiar men. She finds comfort in the women who write “dark strange words shining in the dark”, and these moments are so tender and personal, I felt moved by the narrator’s quiet and questioning relationships to the writers who have preceded her.
Checkout 19 is tactile, poetic, and clear, and its vivid minutiae are lovingly observed. This fulsome, often-clumsy journey through adolescence and adulthood and the reflexive relationship between them is absorbing from start to finish. The book is astounding and sensuous, and the writer’s ability to capture delicious confections like “a scrumptious ball of green pistachio marzipan snuggled inside a toothsome wodge of nougat” is as dazzling as her musical rendering of the most basic actions: “She snores and snuffles sweetly like a baby boar”.
I felt assured by Bennett’s incredible control over the fluid movements between past and present as the narrator contemplates milestones in her life: a trip to Italy borne out of an intense desire to “augment” her teenage understanding of “Beauty and Love and Courage” after reading A Room with a View; the cast of characters she lives with in rented city flats at various points in her life; a crush on a teacher that prompts her to transform a moment of idle, affectionate doodling into the “wavy line that flew up into exuberant loops, throwing off the tightness of the tight spirals”.
The narrator elevates the mundane moment or object to be celebrated alongside the writers that sit on her bookshelf. Everything is deemed worthy of examination and consideration, be it whether or not to return the borrowed underwear, what it means to the narrator to have internalised the idea that women cannot “withstand” poetry, or simply her love of “Wine, pistachios, cigarettes”. Checkout 19 made me feel nostalgic and hopeful, and while it asks more questions than it answers, those questions are generative and open, ever folding in on themselves to become opportunities to see everything anew.
“Turning the pages. With one’s entire life.”
Alanna Duffy grew up in County Meath before moving to Dublin to complete an undergraduate degree in English and French at DCU, which included a thesis on the relationship between Instapoetry, consumerism, and feminism. She previously held an editorial role at a tech company. She is currently pursuing an MA in Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her great loves are contemporary poetry and meringue.
