As madness became a mental illness, unwell people and their institutions took on a more central role in their own stories. Memoirs and autobiographical novels such as The Eden Express and The Bell Jar foregrounded mental breakdowns, from delusions and hallucinations to hospitalization and treatment. These institutions then became subjects in their own right, their straightjackets and bars replacing the repression of society as a whole. Books such as “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”” It presents illness and treatment through a metaphorical lens, not as a subject in itself, but as a symptom of something else.
These are precisely the concerns of Danish poet Fine Gravol’s award-winning debut novel, What Kingdom. Grabor’s anonymous narrator lives on the fifth floor of a psychiatric hospital, in a temporary accommodation facility for young people (the book’s Danish title translates as “Youth Unit”).”) Returning to society after a period of hospitalization. The narrator, who has been diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder and bipolar disorder, has already been institutionalized and comes to the “institutional facility” to learn skills and daily life that will enable him to live on his own again. There is. “With nowhere to live and nowhere to die, we end up in this house of trials,” she writes in Martin Aitken’s vivid translation, “this halfway house of impermanence.”
Gravol’s narrator cannot sleep, hallucinates as if buildings are breathing, and experiences amnesia due to electroconvulsive therapy and drug prescriptions. She craves to devour the neon tube and then spits out her food. Violent episodes are followed by depressing episodes, where numbness gives way to hyper-attunement to details such as fingerprints left on a computer screen or the distinct footsteps of other residents. “Sometimes you wake up and realize that there is no name for what is going to happen,” she observes.
The result is an episodic story that draws you directly into each moment, from meetings on the floor and outings to the grocery store to insomnia and manic episodes, even though her self-harm is omitted. This creates a “self-story with gaps” that is told in the present tense. And sometimes he attempts suicide. The staff work of preparing the razor blade and bandaging the arm is completed in his one period. These gaps reveal the novel’s fundamental instability. No matter how close we feel to Gravol’s narrator, there are many things she cannot or cannot tell us.
Her floor of the residential facility is meant to transition residents into the outside world and teach them the routine of installing guardrails in precarious places. They shop and cook for each other, sing karaoke, go out, and play in a band. After being confined for a period of time, you need to learn to be comfortable in your own room, with your own belongings, and in most cases managing your own time.
It is a deliberately restricted environment that provides its inhabitants with the security of an “imperfect individuality.” The staff are not authoritarians, but administrators and aides who “see both ends of the spectrum.” disease and good As a recognition of personal pain. ” They want to keep sin out of the hospital and ease their reintegration into society. We are a long way from the sadism of Nurse Ratched. However, this security and support comes with real trade-offs. She may be able to design and maintain the narrator’s room, but the staff will always have a spare key. Her home will always be interim, temporary, and subject to changes in the law and her own circumstances.
Mr. Grabol was admitted to a series of psychiatric hospitals as a teenager, and much of “What Kingdom” appears to be autobiographical. Her account is both beautiful and uncomfortably intimate, documenting the effects of treatment on both her mind and body. At the hospital, the narrator takes “something that makes me disappear.” Her staff forces her to drink activated charcoal, turning her waste into a “jet of thin, oily fluid” that only adds to her suffering.
This period is now in Gravol’s past, and although the novel is written in the insistent present tense, her narrator conveys her immediate experience in a variety of ways. She discusses the gendered nature of the diagnosis, “schizophrenic for boys and borderline or obsessive-compulsive for girls,” tells how different laws affect their housing, and explains how mental illness This raises questions about how it can be theorized and treated. These digressions can be aphoristic, and sometimes even extend to small essays about how we think about illness and health. “Psychiatry exists on the premise of an internally directed form of treatment,” she writes. “Can’t we instead imagine an outwardly directed therapy that engages the outside world towards a broader, more inclusive spectrum of emotions?” But her conclusions are open and ambiguous. “I don’t understand.”
The result is a novel that is deeply familiar with the experience and terminology of psychiatric treatment without incorporating any therapeutic tenor. In “What Kingdom,” diagnosis is only part of the explanation, and certainly not the cure. Gravol’s narrator is unable to escape or resolve her illness, and there is no third act in which buried trauma that might yet be resolved is revealed.Instead the poet tries to position us At the inner Her experiences convey the alternately mundane and hallucinatory qualities of deep mental illness through an accumulation of profound details. Page after page, depictions of summertime boredom give way to dreams in which the narrator transforms into a giant gullet and swallows the entire facility, separated only by her one chapter. And by fragmenting the narrative, Grabol effectively disrupts any sense of progress and emphasizes the stop-start, regressing reality of treatment. Her work is not a novel of overcoming or rejection. “Which kingdom?” This work is about surviving and staying alive, the hard-won routines of survival, and the remarkable persistence of life from one day to the next.
Robert Rubsome is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Baffler, and The Nation.
Written by Fine Grabol, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken
islands. 146 pages, $18, paperback
correction
A previous version of this review misidentified Bertha Antoinetta Rochester’s husband in “Jane Eyre.” It was Edward Rochester, not Heathcliff. This version has been fixed.
