A simple storyline, an experimental approach
Believe me when I tell you, Little Scratch is difficult. It will tax you. You will have to learn the syntax of a distracted and distressed mind. But rigour, in this case, is not without reward. Stick with me, and I'll explain why I stuck with it.
Rebecca Watson's debut novel begins on a Friday morning in June, with our protagonist, who appears to live in the United Kingdom, waking late. She is hung over, her previous day's clothes strewn about the floor. She drags herself to the bathroom, showers, rushes to get ready, grabs an apricot on her way out the door. Heads to work (as an assistant in a newsroom), slogs through mindless tasks, zips out of the “dreaded” office as soon as six strikes, meets her boyfriend for a poetry reading, eats dinner, gulps beer and returns to his place.
That's it. That's the plot.
While the storyline is simple, Watson's style is experimental, and revelations about what horrors the unnamed main character has endured trickle, like droplets from a leaky faucet, until the pool of her trauma is made apparent. The writing is stream of consciousness and has the trappings of a narrative poem — lots of white space and italics, can't recall seeing a period in the entirety of the novel — and melds the character's exterior and interior worlds.
As she makes her way through the monotony of the day, this man with the looming face continually stalks her thoughts, and soon her physical space. He is, we soon gather, her boss, who increasingly seems to be something more sinister than a jerky superior. And then there's the scratching.
She wakes scratching. She retreats to the office toilets to tear into the backs of her knees (“I have to stop myself, I know I will stop myself so my body scratches faster, gets in more moves in less time, if you're going to make me tear away so soon I better get my pound's worth”). Her compulsion leaves her furious, “a small angry itching thing” covered in scabs, with dried skin and blood wedged under her nails.
This protagonist withholds from others, but to the reader, she is an open, if addled, book. Much like the quiet triumph you might feel once you've convinced a closed-off person to unfurl, to get comfortable, to reveal intimacies, there's a certain satisfaction to learning that she's an aspiring writer, thinks about sex on the train and is wrestling with a consuming secret.
Granted, the style can occasionally grate on the nerves, especially when you encounter a page filled almost entirely with the word “pedalling” or several lines with just the word “glugging.”
But still if you start this book, I suggest you soldier on. Despite the occasional overuse of repetition, the writing is economical. It's a quick read. It takes a regular day and renders it irregularly, interestingly. It presents grief, violence, self-harm and selfdoubt in an unusual fashion, driving home just how disorienting and destabilizing these forces can be. It is of the #MeToo era, tackling both catcallers and unrepentant predators, but exists on a plane all its own.