Nothing To See, by Pip Adam
Mar. 12th, 2023 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeThe short above-cut-tag version: this is a really interesting book with a lot of matter-of-fact awfulness in it; I don't think it wholly works but I still like it a lot.
Nothing To See introduces two women, one lying with her head resting on the other’s stomach, who are the same woman. From page one, it is impossible to mistake the doubling of characters Greta and Peggy for anything as simple as a hallucination or a metaphor – they’re embodied in too much detail for that. During a period in which Greta and Peggy cannot be coherently imagined as either different (they share a stomach, they are constantly referred to in the first person plural) or the same (they are in physical relation to each other, they can go to different sides of the room), we learn that they are both recovering alcoholics. Drinking, of course, is what makes you see double. The prose is blunt, repetitious, matter-of-fact – within that register, both funny and appalling. Every day, Greta and Peggy can either drink and have their lives destroyed and be raped repeatedly and die, or they can work out how to cook dinner and go to an AA meeting and be bored and talk to people. As one of them says at one point, if they present this as a hard choice to most people they get weird looks – but everyone in the meetings understands. Being sober is a boring, difficult, complicated job that you have to keep doing every single day. The people who make it through do so by working together and by the skin of their teeth.
Peggy and Greta and the women they live with combine to deduce the normality they never got to experience firsthand – how often can you wear clothes before you wash them? How often does society want you to shower? Everyone remembers being served cheese on toast as a child, but how do you cook it? This process of learning is an innocent joy in the penumbra of a vast, consuming blankness.
The throughline of the book about why Peggy and Greta are doubled doesn't end up working for me very well; it flirts with turning a good uncanny novel into a bad s.f. novel - and it knows that's what it's doing, 'This life feels like something whose rules are broken' is one of the things it's saying, but the result didn't satisfy me. I suppose it was always a risk, after The New Animals' structural big swing, that the hope of another such swing would undercut my experience of Nothing To See. Everything else about the book stands up well for me, though. Even if why they're doubled doesn't work, I like what it ends up meaning for them.
(Also, the content warning I didn't put above is animal cruelty: not as much as in The New Animals, but one brief, extreme example).
Nothing To See introduces two women, one lying with her head resting on the other’s stomach, who are the same woman. From page one, it is impossible to mistake the doubling of characters Greta and Peggy for anything as simple as a hallucination or a metaphor – they’re embodied in too much detail for that. During a period in which Greta and Peggy cannot be coherently imagined as either different (they share a stomach, they are constantly referred to in the first person plural) or the same (they are in physical relation to each other, they can go to different sides of the room), we learn that they are both recovering alcoholics. Drinking, of course, is what makes you see double. The prose is blunt, repetitious, matter-of-fact – within that register, both funny and appalling. Every day, Greta and Peggy can either drink and have their lives destroyed and be raped repeatedly and die, or they can work out how to cook dinner and go to an AA meeting and be bored and talk to people. As one of them says at one point, if they present this as a hard choice to most people they get weird looks – but everyone in the meetings understands. Being sober is a boring, difficult, complicated job that you have to keep doing every single day. The people who make it through do so by working together and by the skin of their teeth.
Peggy and Greta and the women they live with combine to deduce the normality they never got to experience firsthand – how often can you wear clothes before you wash them? How often does society want you to shower? Everyone remembers being served cheese on toast as a child, but how do you cook it? This process of learning is an innocent joy in the penumbra of a vast, consuming blankness.
The throughline of the book about why Peggy and Greta are doubled doesn't end up working for me very well; it flirts with turning a good uncanny novel into a bad s.f. novel - and it knows that's what it's doing, 'This life feels like something whose rules are broken' is one of the things it's saying, but the result didn't satisfy me. I suppose it was always a risk, after The New Animals' structural big swing, that the hope of another such swing would undercut my experience of Nothing To See. Everything else about the book stands up well for me, though. Even if why they're doubled doesn't work, I like what it ends up meaning for them.
(Also, the content warning I didn't put above is animal cruelty: not as much as in The New Animals, but one brief, extreme example).
