What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton: book review
This book is exactly what I've spent my whole life waiting for. I don't know if I consciously was aware of that until I was sitting in the light-filled cafe room of Books Upstairs listening to Polly Barton talk about the book, but the statement is still true.
What Am I, A Deer? is the pinnacle of everything I love most in a novel. The sentences are gorgeous and imminently highlightable. The plot is minimal but there is an engine and an urgency to keep reading. The voice is incredibly vibrant, a spilling over from the brain. There is a challenge to the prose that engages my brain. And, more than anything, it is a novel that takes having an all-consuming crush deathly serious. It takes the emotional ride of locking eyes with a stranger on the tram who you will then see again and again but never have much of a reason to talk to and turns it into navy blue covered Fitzcarraldo level art. This is a book that both made me feel deeply seen as a person and newly enlivened as a writer, seeing the possibility of arranging words and sentences in new and fascinating ways that often break convention.
Loosely, the book is about the year that the main character spends working at a games company as a translator after moving from London to Frankfurt. She has previously lived in Japan, and she's done an MA in translation in Japanese. Her real ambition is to be a literary translator, but that's a rarefied position, so despite having no care for video games, she takes the job. It offers her two things, a built-in social network and a minimally involved job which leaves her plenty of time to do other things like obsess over the umbrella man and work on her submission for a literary translation competition.
The narrator has never felt like she truly belonged anywhere. She feels that she's operating on a different wavelength than other people. She often finds this a barrier in social situations that leaves her feeling hollow and disaffected. In this way, she reminded me of a grown-up version of Marianne from Normal People. One of the ways she's found to overcome this is through karaoke, where everyone is borrowing selves from singers and at their least inhibited. When she finds out her co-workers in Frankfurt love karaoke, she takes this as a promising sign that her life is about to improve. Much of the book is spent on her trying to find her place in the world, navigating office small talk, and discovering how to move her current position closer to where her honest ambitions lie.
The other thread is romantic. She spends much of the novel crushing on the umbrella man who she spots on the train and eventually learns works at the same company, albeit a different floor. She also finds his LinkedIn and discovers he's French. She builds a fantasy world in her head about what he's like and what their lives could be like together. People we don't know well, who leave plenty of latitude for projection, often make for the best, most consuming crushes. Barton is reverent to the impact of a crush, and she dissects all of its purposes and motivations with depth and care. She gets to the heart of where both most crushes and obsessions lie—that they're an escape ladder for a dissatisfying life. They are also a chance to try on a new identity or explore parts of yourself. They are a place to explore fantasies around an ideal partner and learn what you want. They are also an excuse for not fully living the life in front of you. The narrator is fully aware of the more delusional aspects of this one-sided relationship she's formed, but she also cannot get out of the labyrinth of her own making in a very realistic way. She proves you cannot logic your way out of the consumption of an obsessive thought pattern. Barton brings an incredible gravity to the portrayal and reminds the reader that you can be a serious, thoughtful person and also contain big emotions and passionate feelings. You can love loudly. That the two don't negate each other, as much society might tell you they are mutually exclusive states.
Crushes rarely have anything to do with the actual object of your affection, more, what they come to symbolize. Barton drives home this point with the umbrella man's foil, the stylish man, another coworker who actively pursues a relationship with the narrator. She's just not that into him, but she's passive enough that she allows the relationship with him to unfold parallel to her crush on the umbrella man. This relationship proves that as baseless as crushes like these might seem, they aren't a symptom of wanting to be in love with just anyone.
This is a truly unique read that impressed me from a craft perspective in a number of ways as well. Barton has written a somewhat intimidating novel. At only 240 pages, the book seems short, but there is an incredible density to it with many paragraphs filling whole pages. And the sentences within these paragraphs are almost all incredibly long, interspersed with multiple commas. This is not usually the style I like to read in. I have wanted to DNF books before over their excruciatingly long paragraphs. There's also no chapter or section breaks to offer a sense of satisfaction along the way. There are, however, snippets of song lyrics that somewhat divide different sections with their all-caps letters. Fair play to Polly Barton for taking on the headache and financial burden of integrating song lyrics for the sake of her art. The lyrics drive home the karaoke motif well. But the prose is so well constructed, so carefully built, that I didn't mind the heft at all. I never got lost in the winding sentences. I never felt irritated while reading. Dialogue and internal narration is sometimes all blended together in large blocks of text, but it is all incredibly clear.
I will say, this isn't a great before-bed read. It's also not one that I found I could speed through. I think a part of me wanted to savor the reading process because I was enjoying it so much as a person and getting so much out of it as a writer, but it is fatiguing to read, on an elemental brain level. Even when I only had 30 pages left and wanted to knock it out in one sitting, I found that I'd read 10 pages at a time and then do a task and return to it throughout the morning. It's a book that repels speedy consumption, which is so counter to the reading experience of most modern novels. I found it an exciting change of pace. Despite violating every craft "rule" I've heard thrown around deriding long sentences and a kind of sameness in length and structure, Deer soars and has become, albeit in a smaller scale way than some of the year's biggest Big 5 titles, an It Book. Barton proves that you don't have to follow a single rule if you have an incredible grip on the wheel of your own project and sense of self. That is beautifully liberating.
Speaking of a grip on a sense of self, this is the closest third person narration I've ever read in a novel. We're embedded so deep inside her head that it reads like first-person. More than that, it simply reads as if you've been swallowed whole by another person and another life. I am deeply impressed at how well this voice is executed and how well it is maintained. There's never a slip of distance. And I think this is partially, beyond the construction, what allows for the brick walls of text in the book. You're experiencing the flowing thoughts of a mind where it's always a torrential downpour. I wouldn't call it a stream of consciousness style, though. There is something that feels more inherently grounded than how that is usually displayed. I also have to commend Barton for thinking through so many modern topics present in a life, giving them real focused, attentive, contemplative time in the novel, without ever compromising the feeling that you're reading a story or giving the impression that the book was written with some motivation to talk about these particular things. They become natural outgrowths of the character and her thought patterns, which is something that even highly lauded writers sometimes fail to achieve.
What Am I, A Deer? is a book that will stay with me for long after the final page and one that I'm thrilled to have as a part of my personal library.
"This was how to better understand language, to develop a violent crush on somebody."
Overall: 5
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