To Rest Our Minds and Bodies by Harriet Armstrong: book review
I honestly don't know where to start with this one. I can't even really tell you how much I liked it? It was a recommendation from a friends, and it's rolled like a wave through the girls of our M.Phil program all taking turns reading it. It's funny going into a novel being told you're going to like something. This was doubled down on by the fact that I'd separately stumbled into Armstrong's short stories and an essay in magazines that I quite enjoyed. I'd been wondering if she had a novel.
The book is very much my lane in the sense that it has zero plot and also examines the catastrophic effects of being in love, never telling the person, and having them only mildly reciprocate those feelings in strange ways that are just enough to perpetuate the hope that something might come through in the end. In some ways, it's like The Idiot. It's set over the narrator's final year of university and is very much about trying to understand an ambiguous connection that makes you feel big things. For the narrator, this is the first time she's really having an intense crush that makes you ask questions about yourself in a new way.
What complicates this is Armstrong's distinct style. I read a lot of books about girls who don't do much but sit there and have big feelings in whatever their particular voice is. This shouldn't feel as new to me as it does. But I think what it is is that I've never read such a disembodied book. This is like a direct translation of someone's brain waves onto the page. A very singularly-focused someone. Armstrong uses interesting techniques to deliver this. The entire book is just split up into scene with circular symbols between them. They run on and on. The only shape given to the novel is the linear progression of the school year with the milestones of holidays and exams coming and going. There is little evolution in the state of the relationship besides some vague point where optimistic hope bleeds into increasing decay. But their interactions don't majorly change, largely because they are so filmy and vague in general. As the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly less embodied and more floating. I think this does convey the emotional reality well. All of their interactions, all of her interactions with everyone, are encased within big paragraphs that bleed with her thoughts. Nothing differentiates dialogue popping up in the middle of a sentence other than a capital letter. There's no commas, no speech marks, no indentations. Everyone speaks in the same chunk of text all at once, which does make it feel like a dream. That it's all coming from inside her head whether it's an action of another person or not. We are so deep in her head that we're beyond almost all logical bounds. Almost nothing real can pierce the spiral.
And there are profound things that come out of that. I highlighted many a passage in the book. I think it captures fear and hope and alienation quite well. Obsession. There are beautifully crafted paragraphs here, and I think this style is one of the most true ways of reflecting the unique emotional situation.
But it's also made me realize that what I crave in novels isn't just a character in a relatable situation or a character dissecting everything in their head but a character who deeply lives within the world. To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is so exclusively set in the mind that it feels almost disconnected from the experience I was looking for. I like sharp precision and tangible specifics. I like seeing someone interface with the objects that make up their landscape, even if they are primarily alone, if they're living in their head. That's just not what Armstrong is interested in in this novel. And that's great in its own ways. It makes the sections where the narrator tries to understand her body, to manipulate it and harm it, in relation to her feelings about Luke more powerful. She is such a mind, how is she to have a body? And the most harrowing, tense scenes of the book come from her intense devotion to figuring that out.
I think the other friction point for me with this book is that the narrator is just so young sounding. It feels like this is her first time being in the world at all. I think the extreme naivety, even as I could relate to some of her feelings and experiences, made me feel somewhat disconcerted. I couldn't figure out how much of it was intentional on the author's part. I guess the voice just didn't really resonate with me in that respect, and it cast a strange tone over the situation where I kept feeling like beyond the harms we accidentally do one another in relationships, I kept wondering if she was well and truly getting taken advantage of because she was so just relentlessly young feeling in this sense that she hadn't even vicariously experienced the world. I think that this wide eyed, taking it all in for the first time, feeling does serve the book in ways but then hampers deeper conversation in others.
I will also caution those who care about story in the slightest that this will be a long, plodding journey. It is an incredibly fast read from the prose style, but there isn't a great deal of tension, and I did feel like toward the end, I wondered what could possibly evolve or surprise for the remainder of the novel. And it really doesn't. I grew tired of her spontaneous crying. Perhaps maybe some of my alienation to the novel is that the narrator is rarely expected to uphold social norms or function through her bubbling feelings. She almost extracts herself from the world. Her friends make a few appearances at the start of the book and then once at the end but largely disappear from the middle. I think this does accurately reflect the isolating feeling of her situation, but it does make it hard to keep a book moving when the only side character on screen is often withholding or not responding or being strange and unintelligible. I know that these situations don't usually have a big revelation in life, and I am a fan of realism in fiction, but usually there is some moment of understanding or healing at the end of all the gunk. Usually, books don't just plod along until they spontaneously end. A part of me did turn the last page and wonder why I'd read it.
There are a few moments that are extremely gripping that fall in the middle of the book, but its structureless style means that these don't really build on one another. The energy rises and then totally dissipates repeatedly. While not being similar in really any way, the book did make me think about Madeline Cash quite a bit. I guess it's that both commit to very specific, singular ways of writing. I don't think either of their choices really elevated the reading experience for me, but I did admire that what they were doing felt unique to them—a difficult charge these days.
I can easily see how someone would love this book. I think it succeeds at everything it attempts to be. It just simply made me realize what it is I truly value in a novel and in a voice. And that's not something that's on the author at all. It's just a matter of sharpening my personal taste.
It's very rare that I confront a book that's perfect for me on paper but then doesn't capture that feeling on the page, not through any technical or objective fault. It's almost thrilling in its own way.
Overall: 4
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