Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh: book review
Clara and Francis wake up in bed together one morning. This is strange. This has never happened before. She's never brought him a mug of coffee in bed. They've never done anything domestic together. Because Francis has a wife and a young daughter at home. Clara and Francis are having an affair.
But this unfamiliar apartment they wake up in allows space for what could never happen in their real lives. The city is gleaming and beautiful and alive. Clara gets to do all the small things with him she's craved in the year they've been together but never publicly, knowably together. Clara caught his eye in an art museum, staring at a painting that follows them into the city of impermanence. She is full of hope and yearning and longing. She tolerates living a half-life to facilitate what Francis needs. As much as Francis loves Clara, he also loves his daughter and does not despise his domestic life or his wife. He will always been caught between two worlds, living two full lives as Clara only lives half of one. The city of impermanence offers Clara all the mundane relationship things she always wanted with Francis while proving to be his worse nightmare where his sexy affair loses some of its luster when met with the kind of practical reality he already has access to. Throughout the novel, they move back and forth between the city of impermanence and their real city, slowly learning the rules of this strange parallel universe. They also watch this place, once vibrant and perfectly clean, react to the state of their relationship, going through phases of disrepair, through desertion. Even this fantasy city, populated solely by adulterers escaping reality, is not always rainbows and butterflies. In a way, this alteration of context starts to set Clara free from the feedback loop of yearning and distance, then extreme intimacy, that keeps her waiting for a man she knows she'll never have.
I applaud Mackintosh's use of the uncanny and unreal to get closer to deep emotional truths that are difficult to talk about. The affair novel has been done time and time again, but she does manage to locate a genuinely fresh twist, by moving us slightly askance of real life, Clara and Francis's somewhat stereotypical positions are put in a new light. There is a great deal of subtlety here. Francis is predictable, yet his character's needs are delivered to the reader deftly. Even in the city of impermanence, the second he gets frustrated with Clara, he's noting how hot another woman is. We know that Clara is not an exception, just one of the most longstanding survivors of the rule, without ever having to be told. Which is not something Mackintosh is interested in. The prose is stark. It is focused on the material reality of the world, of what you can see and smell and taste and hold. This makes sense given Clara's obsession with scraps—testers with his fragrance, the bars of soap he leaves behind in shared hotel rooms to get her smell off him, a hotel key card—that help convince herself the love is real, that it tangibly changes the world even as it only exists between these two people.
Mackintosh draws this parallel universe with enough grounded reality and rules that it feels real in a sense, like it has gravity and is more than just a plot device or a flashy log-line, though it is not the focus. In this way, it feels effortless. Still, it functions to drive home the point that for Francis especially, in the words of Taylor Swift, "It wasn't sexy once it wasn't forbidden." Everything Clara craves is just a step closer to his old life for him just with a new girl. And Clara slowly begins to understand that. Every trip to this parallel world breaks their context and therefore her feedback loop. She is forced to experience him as a full, real person rather than primarily as an idea. She starts to understand that she deserves far more than she's getting. Truly, Clara is on a journey of finding self-respect and asserting the belief that she deserves more even against the signals that feel like they're pointing towards love. This isn't a perfect de-escalation of the affair. Breaking that kind of habit, especially with the way it decimates self-esteem, isn't easy. And Mackintosh cuts to the heart of that incredibly well. While feeling nearly distant at times, she delivers a deeply emotional and moving story.
I devoured the book in a single day.
Overall: 4.5
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