September 24, 2020 59
‘Life Peeled of Its Skin’
Ruth Franklin
Strange Hotel
by Eimear McBride.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
149 pp., $25.00
“Yes I said yes I will Yes.” In high
school, my earthy, fearless friend
Lisa—who was two grades ahead of me
and already initiated into the world of
men and sexuality—had these words
stenciled on her bedroom wall. As I
learned from her, they constitute the
most famous affirmation by a woman
in English literature: the rapturous
last words of Molly Bloom’s mono-
logue in Ulysses, the modernist mas-
terpiece in which James Joyce defied
conventional grammar and syntax in
an attempt to represent the human
mind in all its chaos, freeing fiction
into a new world of possibility. Among
the novel’s innovations was that final
chapter: its intimacy with a female
character’s most private thoughts, feel-
ings, and fantasies, much of which is
famously rendered in one amazingly
long unpunc tuated sentence. Someday,
I imagined, I too would ecstatically say
yes, yes, yes to a man.
Once I got to college and actually
read Ulysses, the novel didn’t offer as
clear a model as I had expected. Mol-
ly’s soliloquy reflects on the disintegra-
tion of her marriage to Leopold Bloom,
closing with her memory of accepting
his proposal, sixteen years before
the novel takes place: “I put my arms
around him yes and drew him down to
me so he could feel my breasts all per-
fume yes and his heart was going like
mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” My
professor told us that Molly’s charac-
ter manifests Joyce’s adoration of his
wife, Nora, to whom the novel is a kind
of homage, unfolding entirely during
the course of the day they first met:
June 16, 1904. (The two of them also
exchanged some of the dirtiest love let-
ters in literary history.)
But my hopes that Ulysses would il-
luminate female sexuality were disap-
pointed. One strand of the novel turns
on Molly’s frustration with the mar-
riage’s long barrenness: they haven’t
had sex since the death of their infant
son ten years earlier. She gets just a
few crude lines about how she longs
to feel her lover’s penis inside her.
Meanwhile, when Bloom, under rather
seedy circumstances, has an orgasm—
he furtively masturbates on the beach
while peeping up a girl’s skirt—it’s ac-
companied by literal fireworks.
When the Irish writer Eimear Mc-
Bride sat down to write her first novel,
she taped above her desk a quote from
a letter in which Joyce summed up his
literary method: “One great part of
every human existence is passed in a
state which cannot be rendered sensi-
ble by the use of wideawake language,
cutanddry grammar and goahead
plot.” Reading Ulysses, McBride said
later, altered her perceptions of what
fiction could do and convinced her that
“within the novel lay the greatest free-
dom I would ever possess.” But as she
began to write, she became aware of
the limitations on “appropriate modes
of expression for female writers” that
she had internalized, particularly when
it came to sex and violence: a “bizarre
prudery, which bore no relation to the
way I lived my life.” As Joyce did before
her, she would have to find a new form
of language to bring the reader closer
to experience than standard English al-
lowed—and then claim it for herself as
a female writer.The result was a novel—and now sev-
eral of them—in which everything fil-
ters through a single female character,
whose thoughts we experience in a lan-
guage of unusual immediacy. First came
A Girl Is a Half- Formed Thing, which
she wrote in six months, at the age of
twenty- seven, while working temp jobs.
It starts when the unnamed narrator
is two and follows her through adoles-
cence into early adulthood, through
abuse, incest, and the sickness and
death of her beloved younger brother.
The combination of difficult subject
matter and unconventional style made
the novel a hard sell: nine years passed
before it was finally picked up by Gal-
ley Beggar Press, a tiny publishing out-
fit run out of a bookstore in Norwich,
England, where McBride was living at
the time. (Continuing to take chances
on unconventional fiction, last year
the press published Lucy Ellmann’s
Ducks, Newburyport, a thousand- page
novel made up almost entirely of one
sentence, which was shortlisted for
the Booker Prize.^1 ) Published in 2013
with a run of one thousand copies, Girl
met with critical rapture and won two
of Britain’s most prestigious literary
awards, the Goldsmiths Prize and the
Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
McBride followed Girl in 2016 with
The Lesser Bohemians, whose protago-
nist might be seen as a Molly Bloom for
our era: an acting student who becomesphysically and emotionally involved
with an alluring, artistic, damaged man
twenty years her senior. A chronicle of
a young woman’s sexual awakening, the
book is at once a coming- of- age story,
an exhumation of the emotional hor-
rors people are capable of inflicting on
one another, and a moving testament to
the power of love to heal trauma. It un-
folds with an emotional and linguistic
intensity that made me feel, putting it
down, as if the molecules in my brain
had been rearranged.
Now comes Strange Hotel, a min-
iature firecracker of a novel as tightly
wound as its predecessor was exuber-
ant. McBride seems to be testing how
much can be communicated within a
radically restricted structure. A woman
visits, alone, a series of nondescript
hotel rooms in cities around the world:
Avignon, Prague, Oslo, Auckland,
Austin. In all but the first, she picks up
a man and goes through the motions
of a one- night stand, with considerable
shame and humiliation. As it turns out,
she’s forcing herself to execute an un-
usual project, the exact nature of which
we don’t learn until the final encounter.
In addition to Joyce, McBride’s for-
mal and linguistic forebears might
include Hubert Selby Jr. and Helen
DeWitt. Her subject matter has shades
of Dorothy Allison’s domestic Gothic;
Anna Burns and Kristen Roupenian
are among her contemporary fellow
travelers. But she is distinct from all of
them i n of fer i ng a f ra n k, u nsenti menta l,
and serious treatment of women’s sex-
ual experience—and in placing it at the
center of her novels. In Girl, McBride’s
primary subject is sex and its relation
to violence; in Bohemians, it’s sex and
love; now, it’s sex and grief. “Art at its
best, like sex at its best, is an invitation
to God- knows- where. That is why they
get along so well,” McBride once wrote
in an essay published in The Guardian.“Using sex as a means of exploring the
human is what art is for.”To say that McBride writes experimen-
tal novels in stream- of- consciousness
style does not capture the wreckage
her sentences inflict on the English
language. Lines break off mid- phrase,
punctuation is percussive, shorthand lo-
cutions substitute for exposition. Girl’s
stuttering language—analyzed at length
by Fintan O’Toole in these pages^2 —cap-
tures the fragmentation of a child immi-
nently threatened with psychic collapse.
In Bohemians, the tone is lyrical and
exhortatory, befitting the excitement of
a young woman in the throes of discov-
ering the world and soaking in experi-
ence: “Await await some blousier you
and know her day will come.” On the
morning after a weekend spent with her
lover, she finds herself struggling to “un-
derstand again how to cover my bones
with my skin,” her ecstatic thoughts
somewhere between poetry and non-
sense, propelled rhythmically forward:Walk. Know your way. See the
here. Recall the place. Turn the
corner. Make and make. But those
histories related, settled like stun,
open their eyes now. Unfurl their
tongues. Begin to exhibit in differ-
ent lights. They beat in me. Ham-
mer at. Declaim Have your love
but remember this All our houses
are the same and there is no place
now without us in.Strange Hotel is the first of McBride’s
novels to be written in the third person,
but it is no less intimately observed.
The woman at the center watches herself
with the attention of a hunter stalking
prey. (She is unnamed, as McBride’s
characters often are; McBride has said
that she omits names as a way of re-
moving one of the imaginative barriers
between reader and characters.) Still,
there is something odd about the way
her thoughts are presented. We see her
up close but also at a remove; it can be
hard to work out exactly what she’s up to.
At the start of the novel, she arrives at
the Avignon hotel, checks in (“Framed
in keys, who is he to me, this arbiter of
rooms?”), investigates her surround-
ings, unzips her bag, worries that her
shampoo leaked on her clothes, cringes
at the smell of the bathroom. Every-
thing seems ordinary, except for the
excruciating self- consciousness with
which she performs her actions and
the sense that something is going on
beneath the surface that she is trying
to conceal from herself. “If she didn’t
know better,” we are told at one point,
“she’d say she had done it on purpose;
employed digression as an obstructive.”
She goes out to the balcony for a cig-
arette and flirts briefly with the man
staying in the next room, who is also
outside smoking. She is tempted to
pick him up but resists: “No other per-
son will be in this room tonight. That
is the plan. That is the plan.” Instead,
she orders two bottles of white wine
from room service and masturbates toCelia Paul: Room and Tower, 2019Celia Paul/Victoria Miro(^1) It is published in North America by
Biblioasis.
(^2) “The Rape of the Narrator,” Novem-
ber 20, 2014.