Book review: Gender Theory, by Madeline Docherty
It is not unheard of to write a novel in the second, rather than the first or the third, person; but it is extremely difficult. Moreover, deploying it does not result in uniform effects: more so than with the more familiar forms it demands a why. One possible function is in the very title of Iain Banks’ Complicity where the “you” becomes collusive and claustrophobic. In Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller it is because the “you” is the always present but rarely directly confronted reader. Ironically, the second person was the closest thing to a first-person shooter computer game in ye olde dayes of the 1980s, with books like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (the genre given a po-mo game twist with Neil Patrick Harris’s Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography – proof, were it needed, he was the right choice for Doctor Who’s Toymaker). There are other examples – Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, several works by Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, Sara Baume’s avant-garde Sip Simmer Falter Wither, the ridiculously good National Book Award-winning satire Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. Each one co-opts the “you” for different reasons. So what is its function in Madeleine Docherty’s debut Gender Theory?Gender Theory is an interesting but not an unproblematic novel, partly because of the primary stylistic decision and partly because of other aesthetic choices. The jacket-flap outlines the basic premise: “You lose your virginity to a boy from your gender theory seminar, and the first person you tell is Ella. Ella’s with you at the party when you first kiss a girl”. The central character visits Ella at her parents’ home and a throwaway line about student friendships strikes a jarring and melancholy note about losing touch and being “busy getting on with our lives”. The narrator will have many different relationships with both men and women of variable duration, but Ella is a kind of lodestone. There is, however, another significant relationship. The narrator is eventually diagnosed with endometriosis, and pain is as defining as sexuality. Neither can be suppressed. Meaningless sex can be an anaesthetic for meaningless suffering; ideas about “getting close”, “tenderness”, “getting out of it” and “losing oneself” are charged differently. The philosopher Wittgenstein noted, “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him” (or her, Ludwig). It is less cryptic a comment than it might seem. Pain, or for that matter, orgasms, are inherently inarticulate. There can be fewer more fatuous phrases than “I feel your pain”. I find being asked to score (or rate, as if it were TripAdvisor) pain “on a scale of one to ten” impossible, since I do not know how anyone else calibrates their scale. The similes and metaphors we use about pain – sharp, dull, throbbing and so on – are all approximations and substitutes.The second person allows for closeness and distance at the same time, being inside the head and outside the body. It is estranging and defamiliarising. Add gender and sexuality to this, and it is even more difficult. I can exert every ounce of imaginative muscle, but I cannot fathom what menstrual cramps feel like. The author’s biography states that she teaches creative writing for Mind Waves, a mental health and wellbeing charity, and there is something therapeutic and reinforcing about the “you”, a telling-back quality. Likewise, there is a quirk in the overuse of the conjunction “and”. For example, on one page, we read: “You dance and start drinking and lose hours in your grimy little kitchen, and then you leave for the club late and run the whole way there to save the taxi money”, then “You’ve developed an impressive circle of acquaintances over the past few months, and you find them after midnight, dressed up in costumes, giving you sweaty hugs and asking for free lines and free booze”. This has a deadening effect, a curious lack of affect, as if there is no agency. That may be how some people experience chronic pain. It is also the general anomie evoked in another classic second-person novel, Michel Bator’s La Modification (which uses vous rather than tu to increase the brittleness).Although in one scene we briefly meet “your” estranged family, the reasons for the alienation are opaque. We learn that “you” are a writer, but don’t write, and one lover “would just love to read your poetry”, but this character glimpse might as well have been tatting or dry-stane dyking; indeed all “you” write in the novel’s nod to self-creation is a letter of apology. Although “you” do a literature degree, apart from asides about the Romantics, Little Women, ee cummings and Edwin Morgan’s “Strawberries” (though the non-specificity of gender is not mentioned), the most “literary” aspect is not reading Proust. More attention is paid to a plot point in Gilmore Girls. There are moments – like a ghastly dinner party – that are well observed, but it is as if everything is seen through a hazy gauze. There may be an interesting text on the vexations and ambiguities of female friendship to be written from this material, but this form can only deliver stifled glances.
Gender Theory, by Madeline Docherty, John Murray, £16.99