Book review: Pond
She reads books about the “gruelling practical exigencies occasioned by confinement”, cultivates “low-maintenance crops”, and only rarely experiences “any enthusiasm for the opposite sex outside of being drunk”.
Thus uproarious, digressive, and predicated on a subjective accentuation of meaningless detail, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut volume succeeds where other contemporary depictions of rural life collapse beneath the weight of their own self-conscious seriousness. Pond is both a short story collection and a novel, even a memoir, a narrative linked by the voice of a character for whom the unravelling of “minor foibles is a relevant pursuit”.
