How one book managed to end a bookclub before it began
Mrs. S and the life force it drained from our Discord
Even though I DNF’d MRS. S, it seems to haunt me. Like bad soup.
Milkduds,
It has been a cool minute since we have breathed life into a discussion of Mrs. S and this, I hope, will be the last before our live discussion on Sunday, August 25 or September 15 (votes are still up on Discord for a few more days!). If you are not a part of our Discord group, let it be known that the date to discuss this book as been rescheduled 4 times and postponed nearly 3 months because so few of us could get through it. Read on as I come to terms with a book I so desperately wanted to love but could not finish.
You don’t have to be queer (though I am blessed to be) to understand the need for queer voices in fiction. And I hope I won’t be mistaken when I say that I am happy Mrs. S exists in this world and that K. Patrick wrote it. I know that I will have a greater appreciation for it after our book club discusses it, and have enjoyed reading features on the author and literary criticism of the book. But for me, I just didn’t enjoy my time. I know what messages I was meant to get, but as a reader, I become frustrated when the style of a work becomes the message — when the rhetorical devices are so overtly trying to say something that I don’t have a lot of room to imagine what the text might mean. I like to be surprised, I like to discover.
I will describe it like this: when I sit down to eat soup, I want to taste all the flavors. Some will be familiar to me, while others will stand out as new or peculiar and pique my interest. I want to guess at what those flavors might be; I want to take more bites to figure it out. I did not want to take more bites of Mrs. S. To me Mrs. S is a highly-acclaimed, excellently plated, cold and deconstructed soup you might find at a fine-dining restaurant that tries desperately to be important through maximum emphasis on the way the meal is crafted but minimal focus on how it tastes. The unnamed narrator, the lack of any punctuation to distinguish dialogue from thought or action, the repeated reference to a long dead character we never meet, and the tedious, emotionally removed depictions of daily life would, in other novels, be the stylistic tools the author uses to build something bigger. In Mrs. S, style is both the means and ends, but that obviousness seems to be purposefully obscured by flickers of bigger ideas that never quite get their moment.
At first, Mrs. S reads like the classic literature I always needed an engaging instructor and a smart discussion group in order to fully understand because I couldn't get to all the substance on my own. So rich was the text! So full of allusions to works I’d never heard of and symbols I couldn’t recognize. But when I sit with it, reading Mrs. S reminds me more of the alienation I felt when I didn’t understand the appeal of my roommate’s boyfriend’s poetry in college. Sometimes the reason you can’t get to the substance on your own is because it isn’t there.
Just
because it
was wr itt en
likethis
does not mean that it was
good.
I think K. Patrick’s interviews and ideas are interesting, but Mrs. S was little more than melatonin with beautiful cover art and a seductive premise. The words were pretty. The ideas were interesting. But I was teflon while reading. Absolutely nothing stuck.
In writing this post, I read a lot about what other people, writers and readers alike, thought of Mrs. S. I enjoyed reading those features, reviews, and interviews much more than the source material. Though this book was not for me, other people did seem to enjoy it well enough. If you find yourself among them, you have my congratulations. But this is my post (sorry Lana) so my opinions are really what matter here.
Why Mrs. S will probably be on every Brit Lit syllabus in a few years:
An excerpt of Can You Still Be a Femme Fatale if You’re Butch? by Kristen Arnett reads:
“In “Mrs. S,” the debut novel by the Glasgow author K. Patrick, bodies exist as a site of ongoing construction. Perhaps this is because our protagonist does not know how she feels about the particular body that she inhabits. And the questions that crop up because of that unknowing make for an entirely captivating read.”
Though the main character does seem captivated by the lives of the characters who surround her, I would never use the word captivating to describe Mrs. S. I found the underlying ideas worth parsing apart and K. Patrick’s rhetorical choices compelling, but the actual experience felt like required summer reading for AP Lit.
With Mrs. S I was thrust back to the doldrums of adolescent Julys where I was mandated to read critically acclaimed writers whose oeuvres speak for themselves, but I was also required to use words like oeuvre to describe them come fall semester. So, I had to get up and take a lap when I found myself annotating the text as if I would be quizzed on it later. I loved school (English and History were my favorite subjects every year) but even I became exhausted at the tiresome and grating pretentiousness that liking some of the texts seemed to require.
Of course when I was a student there were no trans-masculine writers on the syllabus, and thus stories like Mrs. S—ones that explore desire in the context of queerness and gender fluidity—were not the ones we were analyzing. And yet, I do think Mrs. S would fit seamlessly into a Brit Lit curriculum because it seems to require a discussion of and orientation within “the canon” despite its deviations from it with regards to how it depicts sex between women. Patrick attended the same boarding school as the Brontë sisters and was influenced by the gothic romances they penned afterwards: novels in which bleak heroines often led bleak lives within bleak walls of bleak architecture. In fact, Mrs. S didn’t feel wholly dissimilar from my first attempt at Jane Eyre.
Style is not innately substantive. Tension is not inherently interesting.
There are gorgeous lines in Mrs. S — some of the most beautiful I’ve ever read— but they don’t all the way satisfy. And maybe that’s the point? K. Patrick’s prose scratches at the door of poetry but doesn’t teeter all the way into it. (This is sort of disappointing because I have a feeling I’d like their poetry.) In fact, the sentences that connect the more elegiac refrains are so mechanical and dispassionate in their structure that they jerk the reader away from any feeling of human connection as soon as even a morsel of it is offered. What unfolds is a head-splitting staccato of what feel like ethnographic field notes detailed ad nauseam by the unnamed narrator. This stylistic choice cannot be the point of the entire book. Can it?
This Goodreads review remarks that Patrick’s style is “what makes the story work so well” because the way it is written simulates the inner life of the protagonist. The argument seems to be that because we feel how the narrator feels when we read it—desperate, frustrated, confused—that we are more readily able to connect with her, and thus, the book is good.
Jennifer’s take reminds me of an experience I had in grad school where a professor of Special Education enacted a psychological simulation without warning: from the moment the lesson started, he began to treat us the way many educators who are ignorant of ADA laws or implicit biases would treat students who are legally entitled to accommodations for disabilities. He demanded we read certain passages aloud that he knew we couldn’t understand, employed tactics of shame to encourage participation, and mocked students while giving corrective feedback on mistakes. His motives were obvious: this was a social experiment in shame disguised as a lesson in building empathy with students with disabilities. With so many students looking toward one another for help or clarity while this professor humiliated them to make a point, it felt more like an experiment of bystandardism. Who was going to stand up and intervene on the student’s behalf? So tense was the atmosphere that I wondered how long this discomfort could continue before the first person went against the majority and helped. It was only upon standing up and being that voice that my suspicions were confirmed: the lesson was not about advocacy, for I was told to calm down and carry on with the lesson. It was meant to build empathy with students who are denied proper accommodations. The real lesson was a tired one: sit down, shut up, and obey.
There were obviously several design flaws in my instructor’s plan. The first was a belief that this was merely a simulation of social shame; it was social shame. Without knowing that it was an experiment, the public humiliation, fear, and rejection that students faced were real feelings. A “gotcha!” at the lesson’s conclusion does not change that. Furthermore, there was not a need to re-enact classroom traumas on college-aged people in order to build empathy with children: it is a truth universally acknowledged that classrooms are often sites of shame and humiliation. If not the recipients of a teacher’s judgement ourselves, we certainly witnessed it in others and felt powerless to stop it as children just as we felt helpless to intervene now. So even though we all felt the way he wanted us to feel—small, helpless, and afraid—I don’t think his achievement connected me anymore to the experience of an unnamed, imaginary child in Special Education. It just made me feel small, helpless, and afraid.
Experiencing the same emotions as someone else is not actually my favorite way to connect with people because I do not think it necessarily strengthens our ability to understand and share our feelings. Not everything that makes us feel also makes us wonder, imagine, or reflect — and those are the experiences I hope to have while I’m reading. If all that connects me to a story is a simulated emotional experience, then I don’t believe the narrative is as effective as it could be.
I was then and am now more interested in what a simulation of a lesson with differentiated levels and individual accommodations could look like as means of building empathy. A simulation of a least-restrictive environment for us after getting to know more about our abilities, identities, and goals did happen in a different course, though it was not a social experiment; it was just good instruction. My instructor was transparent about her learning objectives for us and offered differentiated experiences before we even needed to ask for support. She created an environment that allowed us to feel safe to take risks, make mistakes, and learn. Because of this, I felt more connected to my teacher, my classmates, and my career in this class where there was no attempt to make us feel anything. I wondered about big ideas. I imagined possibilities.
Tension! Tension! Tension! Tension! Tension! Tension! Tension!
What frustrates me is that this book was made up of ingredients I love — explorations of the body as a site of desire and obsession, boarding school backdrops that inform characters’ relationships with power, examinations of class and gender through the lens of queerness. And yet! Without respite from the oppressive lack of line breaks and without deviation from the simple, monotonous sentence structure in which these ideas were delivered, I found myself uncurious about the words I was reading and often had to hit myself to stay awake. Staccato observations only stimulate intrigue when juxtaposed with legato descriptions. Bobbing, it turns out, is ineffective if you do not also weave.
There is a reason our ears prick up when a bow rips quickly across violin strings; it’s because it is different from what comes before and after. We are startled. We are unnerved. However, when an entire narrative is a series of quick drags across strings—when tension is present without release—it just becomes noise. What curiosity I may have once possessed dissipates the longer the tension continues without a break. I believe this is the point. And instead of thinking this was a really clever move, I just got bored.
What I’ve been trying to figure out is why. Because when I look at Mrs. S through the lens of unresolved tension and the onus on the reader to sit with it (as opposed to the author to relieve it), I think about comedian Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 Netflix Special “Nanette” and how her subversion of comedic structure expertly conveyed the main message of her set. Style dexterously informed substance.
Laura Marlene Walter dissects Gadsby’s set in “The Structure of Nanette” and writes:
“28:54: This is Gadsby’s first mention of tension. She explains how laughter releases tension, and how holding in tension is harmful. “Tension isolates us,” she says, “and laughter connects us.”’
After underscoring the importance of tension-relief in any successful punchline (for a build-up of tension is necessary in the set-up of a joke), she ended her set with a refusal to give the audience what they need in order to laugh. Setting up what the audience assumes will be a joke, Gadsby returns the audience’s attention to a man she mentioned earlier in her set, yet she never delivers a punchline. In fact, she holds onto the tension longer, detailing the abuse she suffered from him and how witnesses failed to intervene on her behalf. She has broken convention: her joke doesn’t work because it is no longer a joke. Instead, it is her story, one that she can no longer truncate in order to relieve the tension and increase the comfort for those who hear it. The price, her dignity, has become too high. She drags the bow quickly, sharply, and relentlessly across the strings. My ears prick. I am paying attention.
I believe if she ended the set there, it still would have worked. But she doesn’t. Laura Marlene Walter again writes:
“1:06:52: She stresses the importance of having her story heard, of being understood, and how our stories are often connected. She brings it back to Van Gogh, and how we have Sunflowers not because Van Gogh suffered, but because he had a brother who loved him—because of connection.
1:08:13: Gadsby’s set ends. After the closing credits, the final sound in the special is that of a teacup meeting its saucer.”
Gadsby proves through her stand-up special that though laughter connects us, it’s not the only thing that can. Though she may not have diffused the tension in her story of assault, she does offer resolution to her audience in the form of hope: there is more than one way to tell a story. And we may be remembered not because of the suffering that informs our art but because of the people who love us and the connections we build with one another.
In my experience, the held-tension of Mrs. S isolated both narrator and reader for so long that the plot could offer neither resolution nor connection in the end. Writer Joanna Briscoe argued that Patrick’s style may have lent itself more readily to a novella, stating, “Atmospheric and daring and at times beautifully written, Mrs S would be more powerful as a novella in which the avoidance of conventional fictional devices in a shorter form would elevate its originality above its own challenges.”
I think this is exactly it. There are original ideas here, and K. Patrick is obviously thinking tirelessly about the body, about desire, about observation and self actualization. But Mrs. S reads like an Aaron Burr type Pick Me Girl, defined only in opposition to what it is not: a conventional, queer coming-of-age novel. So desperate to be different, it does not fully develop what it actually is.
When Patrick speaks about their writing in interviews, I am intrigued:
“Yes, the matron has an acute way of looking: Mrs S is remade through her desire. In many ways she is a Guinevere. There’s a feminine, or even femme, legacy that is at play there, a kind of paranoid, projected ideal version of ‘woman’, happening in contrast to the newness of language that the matron is evolving for themselves.”
See? That is interesting! But I did not get this sense at all from Mrs. S. To me, this feels like when a sommelier pours a glass of wine and says they can smell the petrichor of the summer tempest from the year the grapes were harvested. Like…sure? That’s a beautiful image. It’s also sort of interesting. But those notes are not coming through for me. I just taste wine. And it tastes fine.
Maybe, at the end of the day, I am not smart enough for this book. Maybe the book isn’t for me to enjoy. I don’t think that makes it a bad book, and I am happy it exists. The ideas that undergird it continue to fascinate me, and I will continue to read about their artistic process and contributions.
Here are some of the pieces about Mrs. S that I enjoyed reading more than Mrs. S
In Conversation: Robert Gluck & K Patrick (Granta)
Mrs S by K Patrick review – secret desires at boarding school (The Guardian)
fatma’s review — 2.5 stars (Goodreads)
‘I had a pure impulse to write a horny lesbian novel’: K Patrick on their steamy debut, Mrs S (Independent)
‘Til Next Time!
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