COSMOLOGICAL REPERCUSSIONS OF BOUNDLESS SOLITUDE: Gauraa Shekhar on POND

“Could it be that any apartment, any one at all, might eventually become a burrow?”

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett  opens with this quote from Natalia Ginzburg. Now,  as we find ourselves housebound, slowly dismantling the answer to this question in the seamless melting of our days,  Bennett’s debut collection transcends into something uncanny. Here is a woman, unnamed, alone, in a rural cottage, meticulously diagramming her daytime digressions. Here is a prescient propagation of the mundane, a list of Purell interactions with inanimate household objects. 

Pond was  released in 2016, but the world it encapsulates feels nauseatingly familiar today.

In “Morning, Noon & Night”, the opening story, we find the narrator meditating on bananas. Bananas, she decides, are good for breakfast. Preferable still, if the stalks have a little bit of green on them. Better, yet—if the bananas are cool. Refrigerated is fine, but nothing compares to an evening of rest in a bowl by the windowsill. We go on like this until we arrive at the concept of shaved almonds on oatmeal—which are fine, but only on occasion, as they bear a striking resemblance to fingernails. Threads continue to unravel. Shaved almonds lead to fingernails, fingernails lead to the dirt under fingernails, dirt under fingernails leads to gardening, which leads us back to fingernails, and a particular shade of nail polish the narrator recently painted on hers: Highland Mist.

Each one of the collection’s twenty insular short stories similarly sees the narrator navigating the interiors of her life with a peripatetic purposefulness. The woman, still unnamed and alone—always unnamed and alone—spends her time waiting for deliveries, sharpening focus on circuitous errands and loosening rain clouds. She picks up half-hearted hobbies she is quick to abandon. But what feels particularly exquisite and important here is that sense of ongoingness: we’re never explicitly told what the narrator does for a living, or what she does when we’re not watching. We only get a steady affirmative of mundanity. 

But if there was a fondness with which we looked at domestic realism four years ago, the kitchen sink hath runneth over. The question remains: why read this now? 

In an interview for the Paris Review, Philip Maughan asked Bennett if she looks back fondly on the time she spent writing the book. She replied, “I’m not sure I look back fondly on anything.” But continued: “one night I woke up around three a.m. I didn’t wonder why I’d woken up and I didn’t stay where I was. I got out of bed, went down the stairs, opened the front door and stepped out onto the driveway, nothing was moving. For a few moments I looked at the shed, absolutely nothing was moving, and then I turned around and looked right up above the roof of my cottage and watched a comet or meteor pass over it.”

I read this in the third month of quarantine and think, This is what it feels like to be alive and inside right now. Stillness, absolutely nothing moving, then a meteor.

Right now, I am sitting at the table by the window writing this review. My husband is asleep in the bedroom, and there’s nothing but quiet. It has been this way for almost a hundred days. In a few minutes, a friend will stop by, and I’ll hoist the window pane to hear about the protest through a mesh curtain. After he leaves, a USPS truck will park outside our window, and stay parked for an hour, blocking out daylight, while a man in a mask delivers our neighbor a smart LED TV from Best Buy. Stillness, absolutely nothing moving, then a meteor.

Perhaps what makes Pond so compelling is the world that exists between each one of these twenty stories. A world that is so actively being shut out, the frame only focuses on what’s remaining: the material. Pond is ultimately a book about survival, “the grievous psychological ramifications and grueling practical exigencies occasioned by confinement.” It’s simply what’s left when the world is shut out.

Gauraa Shekhar is a writer in New York City. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod Journal, Contrary, Sonora Review, Fiction Southeast, Literary Hub, The Toast, and elsewhere. She is a Founding Editor of No Contact Mag, the Interviews Editor at Maudlin House, and an MFA candidate in Fiction at Columbia University.