She published little before Pond: a handful of essays and short stories. Born in Wiltshire, Bennett has lived in Ireland since the late 1990s – mostly in Galway, where for a time she worked in theatre. This last sentence is a good example of her frank, funny and fastidious tone. Back home she writes him hundreds of lustful emails: ‘It was very nice I must say to every now and then take a break from cobbling together yet another overwrought academic abstract on more or less the same theme in order to set down, so precisely, how and where I’d like my brains to be fucked right out.’ On this rare excursion, she meets her ‘upbeat boyfriend’, and is soon lying awake beside him, thinking of her potatoes, spinach and broad beans.
When her mind is not on what’s to hand – ‘Some sort of black jam in the middle of porridge is very nice, very striking in fact’ – it strays to the garden: ‘Truth is, I have propagated very little and possess only a polite curiosity for horticultural endeavours.’ Occasionally she is called away – to deliver, for example, an academic paper on ‘the essential brutality of love’. The story in which this morning fret takes place, like most of Bennett’s pieces, drifts between half-formed plot episodes but is driven by its main character’s ruinous affinities and aversions towards things, almost all of them domestic. The nice stuff, it seems, is also nice in the sense of precarious: something that can easily pitch her into disarray. Porridge also, though not when ‘the day’s too far in’, because late morning porridge is a ‘vertical’ sort of breakfast and will sit solidly on the mind all day. ‘It ought not to be too ripe – in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn’t, forget about it.’ Oatcakes too are very nice, and pears laid nose to tail and sometimes laced with redcurrants. The narrator – she seems to be the same person in all twenty stories – is hardly up in the morning before the nice things press on her: ‘Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice,’ she says in ‘Morning, Noon & Night’. T here are many ‘nice’ things in Claire-Louise Bennett’s fiction.
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