Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience: A Review of Booker/ Giller Nominee
Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is a bold experiment that quickly becomes a maddening read.
Her elegant use of language and unique style throughout the book shows Bernstein’s talent as a wordsmith. However, her chosen literary genre— literary expressionism— is taxing for the best of writers. And despite the author’s literary skill, this book needs a significant rewrite if readers are to comprehend it.
Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is one of the best examples of the genre, in which context and detail rank lower than a characters' subjective experience. James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is another great example. I think books in this genre require a bright label along the spine: Beware. A second reading may be required to fully comprehend this book.
With literary sights and expectations of readers high, Bernstein's opening intrigues. “It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time. One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy. Things were leaving one place and showing up in another.”
Sadly, the novel soon starts to unravel. It tells the story of a Jewish woman who moves overseas for six months to help her eldest brother after his wife leaves him. The sister (the main character and a first-person, unreliable narrator) maintains she’s always been an enthusiastic martyr to her sibling’s needs. However, her seething resentment soon becomes palpable. Almost as soon as she arrives, her brother abandons her for out-of-town business.
While the brother is gone, a series of freakish events (alluded to in the opening lines) involving local farm animals, crops, objects and the weather, ensue. The narrator concludes her neighbours blame her for the sinister happenings. She feigns bafflement over their rejection. Yet she sees no malice in creeping into the town, its church and gardens, to leave talisman figures of woven weeds and sticks on her neighbours’ doorsteps saying, “One never knew how one’s gifts might be received”.
Eventually, the terrified townsfolk bury her gifts. Her brother returns, engages with the locals, then quickly falls ill. Soon he is his sister’s prisoner, subjected every half hour to cleansings from dry brushings. To follow these events, readers must struggle through the narrator’s repetitive, stream-of-consciousness ramblings and reminiscences.
And Bernstein doesn’t make it easy. She includes no character names, except for her dog, Bert. There is no dialogue to bring the tale to life. As for setting? No specifics either. This, combined with the narrator’s looping/ disjointed timeline, make for an elusive storyline.
Readers have only one access point to the narrative; the inner monologue and ruminations of an unreliable narrator who has multiple perspectives on mutable events. Though stingy with specifics, the author is more than generous in her microscopic attention to detail. This soon makes for a repetitious read. She favors the multisyllabic word over the simple or direct.
Her sentences are long-winded, almost always more than ten words long and oddly punctuated. Many are more than 100 words long. As an example, a 131-word sentence with a raft of sub clauses has eleven commas. Another ninety-one-word sentence containing the ironic qualifier, to make a long story short, has seventeen commas.
If the reader feels ungrounded and uneasy, a charitable explanation is that’s what the author intended. I doubt it. For Bernstein, a Montreal native who lives in Scotland, has published some excellent works of prose poetry. Her poetic voice is elegant, cerebral and innovative. And, in many ways Study for Obedience reads much like poetry. But it’s not, leaving readers to drown in obtuse fragments of story that loop nowhere.
The book is topical and important in that it’s an allegory for antisemitism, even if teasing this out takes work, too. For example, many readers may not get obscure references to a baseball player who found a higher calling. (It refers to Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg’s refusal to play on Yom Kippur.)
"I was always an incomer, an offlander, sometimes a usurper, more rarely a conniver, it was something in my blood that made others feel this too . . . that I was not to be trusted," the narrator says of her experience of discrimination. People assumed her "ethnic background" gave her "the utmost interest in . . . small economies, the saving of pennies, the charging of interest," so they made her treasurer of clubs and committees.
Antisemitism is most apparent when her neighbours quickly cross themselves then cover their children's eyes or turn their baby strollers away when the sister comes near. This refers to a long-standing antisemitic trope, blood libel. However, it’s fair to ask, for such an important topic, is this the right book, stylistically as constructed, to address it?
Perhaps most disquieting is how when reading Study for Obedience, one gets the nagging sense the author writes down to her readers. Perhaps this embedded pretension may be why such an overwritten, poorly structured book has been shortlisted for the Giller and Booker awards. Such awards often favour elitist, convoluted works. If a book is inaccessible and hard to follow, it must be award-worthy, right?
Her publisher, of course, lauds the book, calling it a horror story and comparing it to the works of Shirley Jackson, Iain Reid, and Claire-Louise Bennett. I agree that the book is unsettling, disquieting and difficult - and as written, a horror story for all the wrong reasons.
Sarah Bernstein Study for Obedience, , Knopf Canada, 189 pages, $24