The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Seduce me with sonnets
This slow-burning debut novel follows a day in the life of an Oxford student whose perfectionist approach slowly falls apart
PRACTICE by Rosalind Brown 208pp, W&N, T £16.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£18.99, ebook £11.49 ÌÌÌÌÌ
To say that not much happens in Rosalind Brown’s debut novel is both true, and not. Practice opens on a winter morning in 2009 when Annabel, an undergraduate in her final year at Oxford, wakes, switches on the light in her room, and begins to research an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Taking its cue from mid-20th-century writers such as Joyce and Woolf, the book is framed by her waking hours. Having shown her going on an impulsive walk, eating three meals and speaking with her boyfriend on the phone, it concludes as she turns in for bed.
Practice is written as Annabel’s interior monologue, so even sitting silently at her desk provides rich material: her thoughts are never still. But the task she has been set – to generate a theory in two days about poems that Shakespeare wrote over years – is not without obstacles. To ease progress, Annabel follows a routine: there are predetermined times to boil her kettle and switch on her radiator, preferable ways to light her room, and an ideal progression from peppermint tea to coffee throughout the morning. All of these actions cradle her thinking and minimise distraction: routine usefully sorts things into what one has to think about and what one does not.
Still, as the morning wears on, the scaffolding starts to crumble, and Annabel’s routine begins to look more like compulsion or ritual – a desperate quest for comfort. This is hardly a surprise when we glimpse what she feels is at stake. Caught in the caesura between adolescence and adulthood, the practice of academic writing is, for Annabel, both a discipline and a series of attempts. As she focuses on her essay and tries to keep distraction at bay, she’s also asking herself a larger question: is she equal to the life of the academic to which she aspires?
The ultimate promise of university is that an undergraduate might germinate their adult life – but this can imperil as much as fulfil. Brown warns gently of tipping too far in favour of the twin absolutes: complete control and complete renunciation. (In the novel’s margins, a skinny girl’s joints strain against her morning run and an anorexic neighbour collapses in her room.) But while Annabel errs close to this kind of perfectionism, monastic seclusion cannot quite dampen the insistent heartbeat of life, with its messy entanglements, its other people. Despite everything, she is enticed into its chaos.
And so it is that we obtain access to the odder corners of her mind, populated by daydreams, memories, fantasies and confabulations that even she finds surprising: “Bravo, mind.” On her walks, she’s accompanied by two imaginary figures, the Scholar and the Seducer, for whom she confects novelistic scenes that assist her in deciding upon certain knotty problems, such as those involving her essay and how she feels about her boyfriend – a 36-year-old GP who plays violin in an orchestra alongside her mum. If Practice is a novel about wrestling with discipline, it’s equally about the generative opportunities of distraction and a meditation on the wellsprings of creativity.
With this, Practice seems to be suggesting that no moment living is a moment wasted. When words fail, the world can take its place – and vice versa. Though Annabel clamps down her wilder, rangier thoughts with self-chastisement, Brown treats us to some firecracker phrases that slide into her protagonist’s slack moments and explode: “obscurely satisfied”, “her mouth, a fragrant speechlessness”, “utterly benevolent, like two slow fish”.
And yet while Brown’s skill in turning words is evident, her audacity in composing Practice entirely of Annabel’s thoughts is the book’s greatest vulnerability: it risks pushing out readers who don’t chime with her. Its context is just as narrowly focused: Annabel is locked into the particularities of the Oxford essay cycle, and is reading English after the arrival of the internet but before smartphones (she can summon articles while leaving unread texts from her friends and family).
Practice clearly belongs to a place and time in which privacy could be more closely guarded. Whether its psychological depth and nuance succeeds in opening out into a more general study of the tension between outwardlylived and interior lives, I’m not wholly convinced.