Claire-Louise Bennett’s exquisite words and dark thoughts

On the morning before we are due to meet, Claire-Louise Bennett retweets a thought from the poet Aaron Boothby: "Sometimes novel is a definition misapplied to a text, and you go about reading a text like a novel when it's not a novel." This worries me, because Bennett's first book, Pond, which is not a novel, reads very much like a novel.

It's a collection of short stories, narrated by a single female character, but they are connected only loosely. They gain a certain significance from their proximity, but you can also examine each on its own merits. Some of the stories are barely a line or two long, while others go on for 10 or 12 pages. It is at times closer to poetry than prose, particularly when singing the praises of tomato puree. So what actually is Pond, or does it even matter? Why is it a collection and not a novel?

“I think there is an energy there and a pace there but I’m not sure it develops in ways we’re used to a novel developing,” says Bennett. “That’s why that quote struck me today, I suppose, because a novel does set up certain expectations in the reader and I really wanted not to confuse the reader at all, or to make things unpleasant or difficult or disorienting. I mean, you can . . . you can have a bit of fun or whatever, but you want them to feel that they’re in on it too, and you’re not trying to make them feel stupid or lost. That’s not very cool, really.”

Internal logic

For all its form-twisting, Pond is not a difficult or unpleasant read. This is largely down to the character of the unnamed narrator, whose internal logic is fascinating to follow. Perhaps most importantly, the joy Bennett, and by extension her narrator, takes in language is plain to see. When you come across a word such as "ensorcelled" in the middle of an otherwise normal sentence, it's hard not to smile at a writer taking such pleasure in the words themselves.

“I don’t want to adopt a certain way or a certain voice there that excludes all these funny little words; I love all of them,” says Bennett. “Things like ‘pronto’. I think ‘pronto’ is in there, and it’s like, who says pronto? That’s ridiculous. It’s just kind of funny. And ‘zilch’.

“That was something that I found interesting about certain writers; it’s not all in the same register. So you will have these really quite exquisite words and then you’ll have these really quite, like, what is that? Not mundane, but they’re on different levels. I kind of like playing with that.”

The book does shift about quite a bit, moving from deep philosophical thoughts to what kind of windowsill is best to store a bowl of bananas on. Although the reader is sometimes reminded that they are being told a story, it mostly feels like the inside of someone else’s brain has been laid out on the page. As a result, the development of narrative takes a back seat to the ongoing phenomenon of existence.

Being alive

“I suppose I’m not so much interested in what someone’s life has been about but how it feels for them to be alive,” says Bennett. “I love working out how someone gets their feeling of being alive, that’s what I get a kick out of. I suppose it’s more about existence than life, in a way. There is a distinction I think, and it plays with that distinction: just how it actually feels to be in the world. There are times you feel really in it, you’re really ensconced in the world, and then there are times when you’re not and you feel a bit locked out of life.”

Pond gains in intensity as it progresses, and as the anxieties of the narrator become more palpable. It's a subtle movement over the course of the book, but it culminates in two stories near the end: The Gloves Are Off and Morning, 1908. The former descends into a syntactic lawlessness, a stream of consciousness that feels akin to Olwen Fouéré's performance of Finnegans Wake in Riverrun, anarchic and primal, mirroring the narrator's digging into the soil of her garden with her bare hands. The narrator practically erases herself in favour of words, words, words. It's the book's most exhilarating moment.

Morning, 1908 is even darker, as it takes the personal erasure seen in The Gloves Are Off and ruminates on it. The narrator walks alone along a country road. Meeting a man walking the other way, her thoughts turn to the grim possibility of being raped. The thought process in the story is uncomfortable to read, but it must have been even more difficult to write.

The story originally appeared in the Stinging Fly magazine a few years ago, but the version in Pond is different, as Bennett felt she was obscuring the real heart of the story too much. Bennett stays faithful to the most distressing of thoughts, and in the process crafts an unforgettable piece of writing.

“Solitude is quite a funny thing,” she says. “In the book she says a few times, ‘When I’m on my own I can’t gauge distance’, whether that’s spatially or in terms of time. There’s also another kind of distance that you don’t experience any more, and that’s between yourself and the cosmos, or the world. More the cosmos maybe. If you don’t feel boundaried, how can you be transgressed? How can you be violated if you don’t know where you end any more? That’s really what it was exploring, in a sense.

“It is a bit of a tricky one. I suppose if I could explain it, I wouldn’t have written the thing. Again, it’s that strange primal feeling, I suppose: that’s what the book kind of touches on all the time. That almost savage sense of yourself, and desire really and those uncomfortable things that we’ve made kind of civilised. Sometimes there is a feeling that surprises, that can take you unawares and you think, That’s a bit out there. But if I’m going to write about stuff, if I’m going to write about what it feels like to be alive, I have to be able to write about those things. Otherwise I’m just pissing around really.”

• Pond will be launched at Hodges Figgis, Dublin, on April 30th. Claire-Louise Bennett will be talking with Christine Montalbetti at the International Literature Festival Dublin on May 16th. ilfdublin.com