These are young women with vague literary affiliations: Pond features a grad-school dropout in the Irish countryside, with various unimpressive but unforgettable love interests Checkout 19 revolves around a voracious reader with odd jobs, murky ambitions, and at least one abandoned manuscript. “he reader is bound to have some knowledge about a person with a particular name” - knowledge that instantly narrows the scope of a story. “ne needs to be careful with names,” Pond’s protagonist warns. Her narrators are unnamed and under-described, hazy contours of characters unwilling to be pinned to the page. What, really, is the size of a story? Of a life? How much is there to be gained in capturing the big picture - and what is there to lose?īoth books by Bennett, an English writer living in Ireland, rove daringly among perspectives - the cloistered I, the aggressive you, the presumptuous we - as if flaunting just how vast a single voice can be. It is neither a small project nor a big one, but rather a reckoning with the very question of scale. You know the type: books that the bored reader finds small and dull - is this fiction, or a guide to interior decorating? - but that the patient reader appreciates precisely because it can’t be so neatly described. Pond, like Bennett’s new novel, Checkout 19, is one of those ambient books. “THERE ARE TIMES when men and women don’t belong inside rooms.” So says the narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, a woman whose meticulously appointed rooms - a pair of delicate prints is given “pride of place” on a mantelpiece, a stem of currants is “strewn,” not draped, in a fruit bowl - provide the stage for much of the story’s drama.

Claire louise bennett books