adultby Bronwyn Fisher
Bronwyn Fisher’s debut novel “The Adult” follows 18-year-old Natalie during her first year at a university in Toronto. Upon arrival, Natalie’s first disappointment was the trees behind the dormitory. At first Natalie thought they might represent the forest. She’s like the trees in her remote rural hometown of Temagami, Ontario, but upon closer inspection, Natalie says, “They were planted narrowly together,” and their even I realized that sex lacked depth and wildness. This leads to a series of common undergraduate disappointments. It’s the anxiety of an introverted woman from a small town when she’s separated from her parents for the first time. A tenuous friendship built through icebreakers and drinking parties. She wonders how she ended up taking classes with names like “Material Religion” and “Natural Poetry.”
Despite being staged as a campus novel, most of the plot unfolds off-campus at the home of Nora, an older woman with whom Natalie becomes romantically involved. Nora is one of the important adults in Natalie’s new life, but she’s devised a plan to keep her poetry professor, a young woman named Jones, and her college friends from telling her that she’s queer. There is also Paul, a fictional older boyfriend. She meets Nora when she is sitting on a park bench trying to write a nature poem for her class. Nora is flirtatious, persistent, and knowledgeable. The ensuing romance soon materializes into a domestic couple, but Natalie cancels her plans to spend time with her co-workers with Nora, and she often dodges the question of where she’s been since then. .
Through Natalie’s sensitive and vivid narration, Fisher powerfully evokes the all-consuming power of relationships confined to the private world. Natalie considers Nora to be omnipotent and fantasizes that her lover’s voice is powerful enough to intercept automated tram announcements. “I wish I was her body movement, too,” Natalie thinks. “Something one of her thoughts might be able to control.” “The Adult” delicately navigates Nora and Natalie’s various imbalances: age, power, wealth, experience. As the novel progresses and secrets from Nora’s past begin to destabilize the present, Natalie’s chronic doubts and speculations begin to look more like dull intuition than adolescent anxiety.
This exuberant tension makes The Adult an almost understated thriller, but the novel’s quiet plot lies in clarifying, or fragmenting, the awakening of queer desire. Early in her poetry class, Natalie was fascinated by Jones’ evocation of the unbridgeable yet rich chasm between life and language, the world and words. In the professor’s words, “the difference between what we want to express and what we can express.” ”
Although Natalie seems to have a weakness for languages, her queerness allows her to quickly translate the heteronormative world. While scouring the Internet for advice on dating her older woman, she seamlessly replaces herself with her search results that assume she’s a younger man. She then envisioned Nora as the “he” in an article titled “32 Signs He Loves You Without Saying”. When her friends assume her secret lover is male, Natalie’s willingness to replace Nora with “Paul” has more to do with her ability to lie than it does to her oblique queerness. It seems to have something to do with the way they are often forced to exist at angles. to heteronormative assumptions.
In this context, Jones’ poetry classes became important, prompting Natalie to question her own view of the world and seek to express herself differently in relation to her environment. Natalie watches a video interview with the professor, a famous poet. In it, like Oscar Wilde’s green carnation, “Historically, queer figures have used flowers as a marker of identity,” she said, without understanding nature. We cannot fully understand nature. A non-dual state of being. Nora may be Natalie’s first adult partner, but readers feel that it’s also Jones’ rank that draws the protagonist into something of an adulthood. Towards the end of her novel, Natalie’s observations of the natural world (pink and purple flowers, her own shadow) present her with a strange ecology of possibilities and possibilities. ”
Daisy Lafarge is the most recent author of the novel Paul and the poetry collection Life Without Air.
adult | Bronwyn Fisher 305 pages | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill | $27
