Early in Study for Obedience, Sarah Bernstein’s singular and terrifying second novel, the narrator reflects on her most recent occupation as audio typist for a legal firm. “I was at my best,” she tells us, “when I felt like a pure vehicle, a simple mechanism for the translation of sound into text.” Now she has been transplanted from this life into another existence, as housekeeper in a remote northern latitude. Here, she must launder, dust, cook and maintain an immaculate living environment – and in this new life, as in the old, she must be careful and dutiful and silent unless instructed to speak. Her task, always, is to fulfil the needs and desires of others.
The Coming Bad Days (2021), Bernstein’s remarkable debut novel, focused on a theme of distance, analysing how everyday life can possibly be navigated in a society that increasingly values atomisation. In this new novel, these preoccupations are taken further, the cool tenor of the earlier book shifting now into incipient horror. Almost inevitably, there is little need for the most basic cultural and social equipment in Study for Obedience: the protagonist, the occasional other figures with whom she minimally interacts, this remote, forested northern place itself – all are nameless. The nature of care and the assumptions which underlie the notion of duty are examined, and their various corollaries exposed: carers can all too frequently be subject to degradation, abuse and humiliation; duty can mean relinquishing one’s own dreams and aspirations in the service of others. The protagonist has never experienced belonging, or life within a social order, and as a result has interiorised a sense of nothingness.
This, then, is a story of abjection: its engendering and its consequences. The protagonist, as she scrubs, polishes and participates in rituals of cleansing, consistently describes herself “trespassing” upon the rights and properties of others: “My presence violated some crucial and unspoken rule, which I thought now had to do with narrative, the right of a people to preserve the stories they told about themselves and their own history.” This compelling book serves as a powerful castigation of those who would draw the lines of society and communal identity so as to narrow diversity, and to punish those who dare to be different.
