I Will Follow Claire-Louise Bennett Anywhere

September was a pretty banner month for me. For one thing, I got to attend a 10-day writing residency on an off-the-grid island, with two other writers, a wood-fired sauna, and some attendant loons and beavers. For another, I got my hands on Claire-Louise Bennett's newest book, Checkout 19.

If you aren’t familiar with Claire-Louise Bennett, then you should probably go and read my review of her debut book, Pond. It's beautiful, thoughtful, funny, and unusual. When I found out about Checkout 19, I was very excited. In fact, I was so excited that I sneakily ordered it from a UK bookseller so that I wouldn't have to wait for its North American release in spring 2022.

I'll say it straight off the bat: she is not a writer for everyone. The back cover describes this book as “fusing fantasy with lived experience,” and make no mistake—Checkout 19 is weird. I loved every single moment of it.

I am going to try and give you a picture. It’s going to be hard. So before I begin, a taste:

She talks about turning the pages here—and Checkout 19 is a page-turner, in its own kind of way. It’s not so much that there is a thriller of a plot that you need to see resolved, but that you are carried along on the backs of long, rolling waves of words, caught up in their momentum. The sentences meander and digress and come back full circle—or else end up somewhere entirely different and unexpected, but somehow perfect. The syntax is strange and beautiful, and the punctuation is delightfully sparse. The ultimate impression is one of being in a sidecar along for the ride with a mind that is blooming with images and ideas that you just can’t take your eyes off of.

Checkout 19 is a book about reading, and a book about writing. Its narrator speaks sometimes as “I” and sometimes as “we,” and describes her life and experiences over and over through her relationships with books and words. Her first forays into writing, her memories of and preferences for certain books, the large and small experiences and traumas that have informed her words—these make up the story. We have windows into her own vivid imagined characters, such as the fantastic Tarquin Superbus (“a very elegant sort of man who lived in a very elegant European city sometime in a previous century”), and the girl in the dungeon who sews her sisters‘ clothes “until her fingers are reduced to threads and her body goes up in flames.”

We see too, her relationships with people—family, teachers, roommates, lovers, friends. Those who intrigue her, those who puzzle her, and those who violate and traumatize her. There are dark moments and there moments of levity and there are moments of absurdity. And always that reflective, thoughtful narration, pulling things into the light that you might not have articulated for yourself, but that you absolutely recognize.

Alongside the sublime prose, Checkout 19 can also function as a “recommended reading” list. Lists of all kinds abound in its pages, but most of all there are lists upon lists of books. These are interspersed with the narrative, framed as “I had read” or “I had not yet read,” or “I had not read and still haven’t,” and one gets not only the lists of titles that are important (or not), but also the chance to fit together for oneself what it means to her that at whatever point in her life she is at, she has or has not read some crucial text. Here is just a handful of the authors that she mentions: Ann Quin, Annie Ernaux, Italo Calvino, Renata Adler, bell hooks, Peter Singer, Clarice Lispector, Jean Rhys, Natalia Ginzburg.

I tell you all of these things, and yet I am not even remotely doing this book justice. I laughed out loud while reading much of it, and at the same time it stirred something deeper. Claire-Louise Bennett is truly a wonder, and, as the title says, I will follow her anywhere she wants to take me.