Book reviews: Mammoth by Eva Baltasar | The Most by Jess Anthony

Eva Baltasar | Eva Baltasar

The novella is an unforgiving and uncompromising form. For reasons I cannot fathom it has enjoyed a bit of a fillip recently: over the past year I greatly admired Victoria Mackenzie’s For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, Clear by Carys Davies and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. The French seem to have a particular aptitude for it. Eric Vuillard is a master of the form and Faraway The Southern Sky by the enigmatic Joseph Andras is a truly revolutionary book. With the novella, there is nowhere to hide.

Eva Baltasar was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2020 for Boulder, in which a ship’s cook, the nicknamed eponymous character, struggled with her female partner’s desire to have a child. It had clear affinities with Balthasar’s prose debut, Permafrost, where the lesbian narrator chafed against her family and her own self-harming ideation. Mammoth is clearly in the same territory, but with crucial differences. The narrator has a party because she “planned to get pregnant… I wanted to be a single mother, for no father to claim his share”. The family and lover of the previous books have been replaced with a paradoxical commitment to the self alone; indeed, it can seem as if she wants the experience of pregnancy more than to be a mother. The opening page describes her “masturbating in the sun while longing for a child. The singing of caged birds lulled me to sleep”. The disjunction hints at meanings around confinement, liberty and self-possession. A similar potential matrix of meaning is set up around her day job dealing with end-of-life experiences, which she detests as “reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime”. The sex she has is uncomfortable and unsuccessful – she seems to suffer from vaginismus – and when her contract ends, she heads to the back of beyond.

Her life is pared back, ascetic. “I like the thought of a house” she says “without a real bathroom. The pigsty-messiness of it. I like that I have to focus on the essentials. How the need for a bathtub drives away all my more trivial thoughts”. Of course, she does require someone else to fulfil her objective, and apart from chance encounters there is a nearby shepherd. This is certainly not arcadian or bucolic or pastoral or idyllic. Helping lambing does not spark any maternal feeling, any more than her adoption of a dog whimsically named Knock-Knock or her vendetta against the stray cats (their gruesome death is perhaps the most visceral scene in the book). It is strange that the jacket-copy coyly says that she “dabbles in sex work” when the text itself states “Something extraordinary happened: the shepherd asked me to be his whore”, a proposition which she does not decline.

Baltasar had published ten books of poetry prior to writing short fictions, and her prose has an oblique rather than cryptic quality. The end of the book seems to offer a closure, then seems not to, and there are too many lacunae and aporia, too many disconnects between cause and effect throughout, to settle on what exactly has occurred. The real difficulty is that the narrator is so saturnine, anhedonic, sour and judgmental it is nigh on impossible to feel either empathy or curiosity. If the novel has an existential point, it may be in the horror that having scarified and attenuated and flayed, all that is found left is nothing. “Nothing is mine” she says “except for me”. The publishers may call it a “howling crescendo of social despair”: it struck me not so much as a bang as a keening whimper.

By contrast, Jessica Anthony’s novella The Most is an utter joy, as crisp and unexpected as the surprisingly sunny November 1957 day over which it takes place. It is almost a distilled novel, and reads like a late, undiscovered masterpiece by John Cheever (and not just because of the melancholy of swimming pools).

It would be too easy to call the two-children, golf, church, swimming pool condo life of Kathleen and Virgil Beckett a façade, since both earnestly want to believe it. The novel’s opening conceit is Kathleen, saying she feels unwell, deciding not to go to church, but use the unused pool. Once in, she chooses not to come out. Very slowly and elegantly, the pieces of backstory are filled in, the disappointments, the moral compromises, the moments of shabby cowardice.

Like Laika circling above them, the claustrophobia has an inevitable end. Kathleen was once a promising tennis player, in love with her Eastern European coach, and “The Most” was his famous shot. It traps the opponent in a rally before, as he says, “bomb’s about to go off”: a reference to his parents kettled onto a bridge primed for destruction in the war. The alternating chapters between Virgil and Kathleen resemble the rally, with the reader guessing what salient fact is the bomb – a move used infrequently so that it cannot be copied or predicted.

The Most offers the all-ness of life; Mammoth, by contrast, is arid and lifeless.

Mammoth, by Eva Baltasar, trans. Julia Sanches, And Other Stories, £12.99. The Most, by Jessica Anthony, Doubleday, £12.99. Eva Baltasar is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 19 August