The Listeners By Leni Zumas (A Review By Helen McClory

 

Tin House

 

352pgs/$15.95

 

Some books require you to focus when reading. They jingle with loose connections you are meant to, as an active reader, hold together for the curren to pass through. While reading The Listeners, I flailed at first, wondering at the language, why it didn’t flow as I read it.

Early on, the family at the centre of the book have a dinner together:

 

The house on Observatory Place was a meek square of brick and blue wood, pots of geraniums on the porch, walnut branches a-scratch at the upper windows. I coughed to disguise my huffing from the hill, a hill that in high school had not challenged me at all.

[…]

When it was my turn to report, I poured another wine and said, “Same as usual, business very bad.”

“Might be time to look elsewhere,” Fod said in the fake casual voice.

“I can’t ditch Ajax,” I reminded him.

Mert, who was ashamed to have a daughter in her midthirties working in a bookstore (a used one, at that) cut in: “Squidlings, how about helping me with some cleaning next weekend? All that junk in the basement, there’s so much that really should be tossed…”

I spooned a splotch of parsnip. Riley said okay.

“Thank you, Coyote – Saturday morning?”

I said, “You’re not getting rid of any of her stuff though, right?”

Mert said, “Want to come by at nine thirty?”

I mouthed at him, Don’t throw her stuff away.

This is the language of family life. Nicknames, short cuts. You must acquaint yourself with it. The ‘she’ who is unnamed, whose stuff is in the basement and should not, for some important reason, be thrown out. I understood this. But the language itself. It squirms and dots about – the connections fire and sometimes miss. ‘I spooned a splotch of parsnip’ should not have drawn my attention so much. Does parsnip ‘splotch’ I asked myself. It more flops. If it’s cut in matchsticks. Or then, is it mashed? But mashed substances don’t ‘tch’ they, they, plmp or thlop or some other wet, nonsense sound. Yes, I did feel pedantic while doing this.

 

There was something in the rhythm of the sentences too, the poetic quality they had, which caught me out. ‘I coughed to disguise my huffing from the hill, a hill that in high school had not challenged me at all.’ I could see, objectively this is a well formed sentence. I wanted to know why it ran to a beat that I could not absorb. I kept reading of course. The story was intriguingly hazy and the characters interesting. And there would be these moments of tugging, anxious truthfulness:

 

 There must always be someone to watch the body, ensure it won’t do the wrong thing: bulge too far, shrink too near. If I could have picked a body to be in, it would have been a man’s. That straight-down-ness, that bony plunge. In a chap-husk my thighs wouldn’t chafe; they would be lean and long and ready to run me away from machete or mastodon.

 

I utterly love this passage up to the point of ‘bony plunge’. The sentiment is painful, and speaks strongly of the character’s pain, disassociation, and of I think a particularly female thing to do – at least, I’ve felt the same. Aware of the need to be within certain limits, that a man will never feel, with his limber frame and its security. And then, the lyrics kick in. ‘chap-husk’ (on its own, perfect) paired with ‘chafe’, ‘lean and long and ready to run’ and ‘machete or mastodon’, and I wince. I understand that they come from Quinn’s musicality, that they fit with the character, that other people might love the bouncing sentences and alliteration, just as I loved the spot-on dialogue, the moments that fired me, when they came.

 

I should say at this point that my reading was completely influenced by the fact that I’m one of those people who flinch at flickering lights. At repeated sounds coming from others, especially those little incessant coughs and the like, which are not involuntary but seem to be following patterns of behaviour which I cannot hope to stop and therefore should not be worried about. I’ve rarely found that words on the page, so blissfully silent, have caused the same anxious reaction, but it does happen, and it happened with The Listeners.

 

Further reason why I am a bad reader for this book: I believe I have mentioned before here that I am phobic of blood and injury. No reason, I have never suffered nor seen anything bloody that did this to me. Some books have led to all-out operatic swooning sessions. Films, more often. The Listeners drew me down into the woozy place.

 

The ‘bloodworm’ that Quinn sees, a marker of hungry death and injury and a feeding loss that comes from within the self and has been made abject, had me nearly falling down as I waited in council offices trying to sort out a billing issue. From then on, whenever I picked up the book I was on alert to these two things: the off-tap dance of the words, and the fear that likes to play with my sense of gravity.

 

But I only speak for myself, for two quirks of my brain. I do think that The Listeners is a well-imagined and convincing example of the spiraling of pain and loss and memory. The grief that comes back to haunt. The joys, too. The creativity that burns out against the grief. It tells of how the impact of violent death and injury are recursive, that the traces found everywhere, even if the origins seldom named. That the world is full of these sorts of present absences. And it does it in an unflinching way. Without having read this, I would still have known these things, but I would not have known them quite so vividly, viscerally, behind my blurring eyes. A good book that fizzed in the blood.

 

Helen McClory was raised in both rural and urban Scotland. She has lived in Sydney and New York City and is currently to be found in the South Side of Edinburgh overlooking a prehistoric cliff face. The manuscript of her first novel KILEA won the Unbound Press Best Novel Award 2011, and publication is currently being sought for it. To keep the wire steady, Helen is working on a second novel about the intersections of love, failure and technology set in New York, New Mexico and Cornwall. Progress on this at: http://schietree.wordpress.com/