One Boat - Jonathan Buckley
I'm still coming out of a reading slump and finding it a little difficult to really sink into books, so it was nice to find a novel that I could get through in a single day after months of slogging through things even when I was otherwise enjoying them.
This year I seem to have read a lot of books that investigate the ways in which we narrativise our lives, how we construct stories after the fact about the things that we do and experience, and how we attempt to ascribe meaning to events that are largely out of our control in order to try and feel like we're in charge of our lives. This is another of those books, and it's one that I liked a lot.
Thematically this shares some space with Katie Kitamura's Auditon, also on the Booker Prize longlist, and Neel Mukherjee's Choice. I liked this more than Audition but less than Choice.
Now that it's been a couple of days since I read it, I find that I'm thinking about One Boat quite a lot. The main character, Teresa, tells us that she always wanted to be a writer but that her life pulled her in a different direction. She spends her days filling a journal with observations about the people and landscape around her, observations that she writes in very heightened, "literary" language. It's clear from these journal entries and the philosophical conversations that she keeps foisting upon the people she spends time with that she considers herself an intellectual and something of a philosopher, and yet when you get beneath the layer of language that she clothes everything in, she really has nothing much to say. This is contrasted with the poetry written by the mechanic she once had an affair with, which is stark and simple and often the source of scorn and mockery from Teresa and the people she speaks to. There's an attitude among the characters that the mechanic should not consider himself a poet, that he has ideas above his station, that he isn't as intellectually or artistically developed as everyone else because he works with his hands. And yet his work affects Teresa deeply, and it's on a juxtaposition of his poems and her attempts at writing autofiction that the novel ends.
I suspect that this theme - who gets to make art? Who deserves to have a point of view that we listen to? - is present in the novel throughout, but I didn't pick up on it until late in my reading. The result is that I find myself wanting to revisit this immediately to see what I missed, and I look forward to going back to it.