If you are one of those people who complain about books that are largely about reading and writing or prize realism and plot above allusion and self-referentiality, steer well clear of Checkout 19. If (like me) that's exactly the kind of thing that attracts you to a novel, it is unlikely to disappoint you. It's very hard to summarise but is a short but curiously expansive (lots of long paragraphs and slightly unnecessary lists) book, which is part novel and part literary criticism, full of intriguing references and memorable quotes. Quite late on the narrator says, "we read in order to come to life' and that is probably as good a way into it as any. For me it could have been both longer and more tightly-edited, but despite this, there is so much here to contemplate and enjoy.

Oh dear this was just painful for me unfortunately.

A rambling unstructured narrative that waxes lyrical it seems for the sake of it.

You know the type of people that can talk til the cows come home without actually saying much but they won’t stop? This is what this felt like.

The closest I have ever come to a DNF. I just don’t see the appeal of this 200 plus page of self indulgent unedited feeling nothingness.


Obviously not for me, I would like to thank the publisher for the ARC.

Like diving into a big vat of Alphabet Soup where letters form words and surprising phrases that wiggle their way into all your soft creases and cracks. You might be tempted to open wide and swallow it all down in one big gulp which would be very satisfying. But equally, if not more so, ingesting it sip by brothy sip, could be even more fulfilling.

<i>“I’ve always been very taken with aubergines, with the way they are so tightly sheathed in a shining bulletproof darkness. When I was a dismayed student in London I often fantasied about hanging a great many aubergines from the square ceiling of my sketchy boudoir.”</i>

I loved this – it was everything I wanted as a follow-up to <i>Pond,</i> and more.

It's similar to <i>Pond</i> in the sense that it could also be read as a short story collection. “Essayistic” could also arguably be used this time around, as well as (Lord help me) “autofiction.” This book reminded me of Bolaño, in terms of its obsessive championing of literature and novels. This is probably the most important thing I have to say: <b>I NEED a list of all the books mentioned in this novel.</b> Anais Nin and Ann Quin feature prominently, as does Lucy from <i>A Room with a View,</i> but there are many more. I particularly loved the scene in which the narrator lends a Ferrante novel to a woman she meets in Morocco – very moving.

A big theme in this book is the POTENCY of writing, reading, books, literature. Reading is built up as this BIG THING – <i>“It is a matter of life or death in fact. Yes. Yes. Yes, it is. Turning the pages. Turning the pages. With one’s entire life.”</i> It serves as such a valuable antidote to the idea that literature is "just" entertainment (yes, it can entertain, but it is also so much more!). The style reminded me of Keith Ridgway, or Beckett. My God, there really is something in that Irish water that makes people write!

Also within this novel is a coming-of-age story - a Künstlerroman (ooo, fancy word, I know). I LOVED the part about her getting her period in school and having to borrow another girl’s knickers – I will never forget the description of a sanitary pad as a “big smelly sheep.” More importantly is the James Joycean “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman” vibe. We see her doodling in the back of exercise books, and reading, reading, reading. <i>“I was studious and diligent, yes, but that didn’t prevent me from having wild and boundless thoughts.”</i> There’s a very beautiful moment in which a teacher asks to read one of her stories, and it serves as a powerful anecdote as to how sometimes all it takes one person – their belief in you, and their support, and a kind word – to make the difference of a lifetime. This, along with the Russian man who gives her Nietzsche at the checkout stand where she works, serve as key moments in her development as a writer.

<i>“Writing could do that. Here was a way of reaching someone, of being with them, when you were not and never could be. Here was where we met. Here was where the distinction between us blurred.”</i>

The next section of the book follows the narrator into university and we get a story-within-a-story that I found just plain DELIGHTFUL, and so different from anything I remember from <i>Pond</i> – a quirky, Calvino/Borges-esque tale about a library of blank books containing one sentence that is different for every reader, but when read, it will change your life. I loved how bonkers this section was – to me it read as a metaphor for the power and joy of creation and invention.

<i>“Well we all have promise, don’t we? We all feel it thumping in us, especially around that age, seventeen, and it’s irksome. What are you going to do? Everyone wants to know all the time what you are going to do and nothing makes them quite so cross as when you don’t want to do anything at all. Do something! Do something! … Allow my promise to thump away inside of me, madly, madly, without feeling irked by or terrified of it.”</i>

There’s so many other wonderful set pieces and moments in this – the boyfriend who pulls her hair at the concert. The scene where she goes to Yorkshire (what causes her to go there, and what causes her to leave, are SUCH powerful moments). And thrumming underneath everything is this incredible serious attitude about the value of LITERATURE, and ART. Overall, this reminded me Deborah Levy, in the way that Bennett takes the goal and mission of creative women very, very seriously. <i>“It was the activity of drawing and not the drawing itself that was of any value – I was not drawing for posterity, certainly not.”</i> The image of a woman stitching in the dark is used often, which is SO freaking Jungian – think of the weaving/spinning Fates, the way this ties in with the ‘drudgery’ of everyday domestic labour, etc.

I think anyone who considers themselves a serious lover of literature and books should read this – more than anything else, I read this as a celebration.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

"Certain written words are alive, active, living – they are entirely in the present, the same present as you. In fact it feels as if they are being written as you read them, that your eyes upon the page are perhaps even making them appear, in any case, certain sentences do not feel in the least bit separate from you or from the moment in time when you are reading them. You feel they wouldn’t exist without your seeing them. Like they wouldn’t exist without you. And isn’t the opposite true too – that the pages you read bring you to life? Turning the pages, turning the pages. Yes, that is how I have gone on living. Living and dying and living and dying, left page, right page, and on it goes."

This is Claire-Louise Bennett’s long-awaited second long form publication after her debut “Pond” (published by the small Irish press Stinging Fly which transversed the novel, short story and flash fiction forms into an ambitious and unique work.

This book is a series of seven (partly auto-fictional?) first person chapters (essays?) - the first written in a plural “we”.

The longest of these (the fourth) has as its centre a story the narrator first started many years previously – which starts life as a rather eccentric character study of an flamboyant Venice-based flaneur before evolving into more of a Borgesian fable about the power of literature – the evolution reflecting the narrator’s own evolving and expanding experience as a reader (the phrase “I hadn’t yet read ….” acting as a recurring motif). But even this centre is at best the starting point for various digression – digressions which seem often more at the non-sequitur than chain-of-association end of the spectrum.

The other chapters are in some ways riffs around the same ideas, linked by narrator and recurring ideas, themes and incidents – all underpinned by literature – writing and reading.

The writing is very much more people and relationship based than “Pond” (which set out to deliberately reject what Calvino called “anthropocentric parochialism”) but shares much of its emphasis on patterns, connections, impressions as well as ultimately on solitude, the individual and the outsider.

The narrator seems more alive in the world of her own writing, her drawing, her reading and identifications with the lives of fictional characters or their authors, and with her own reflections – than she ever is in any relationships (be it with schoolmates, boyfriends, fellow students, flat mates or parents). It is perhaps telling that the book’s title is taken from her time at working at a supermarket and a key recurring character a returning customer whose life she imagines vividly, almost feverishly, especially after he gifts her a book.

Sometimes the writing seems sharp and evocative - – an examination of the writing of Ann Quin and her “fidgeting forensic polyvocal style as a powerful and bona-fide expression of an unbearably tense and disorientating paradox that underscores everyday life in a working-class environment – on the one hand it’s an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet, at the same time, much of it seems extrinsic and is perpetually uninvolving” is both interesting and shows how the narrator is considering both Quin’s own life and how such a style is appropriate to her own writing.

I enjoyed also this description of Yorkshire “Even the mountains were unpleasant and begrudging. They did not soar upwards. They had no business with the sky. No, they were embroiled with the comings and goings below on that mile-long road. Huddled together like debt collectors blocking out the sun.” - and this description leads into perhaps the most sobering and shocking part of the novel.

Other times though I found the writing a little less original or redolent. A lengthy section on menstruation seemed to be something that would have been provocative twenty years ago. And this is buried in a second chapter set in the narrator’s school days which seems sprinkled with thesaurus -swallowing overwriting – for example repeated attempts to try chemistry explosions are: "Such recursive hijinks were most often deployed in the science labs, where the pupils’ incendiary hands might easily alight upon and combine a spectrum of appliances and substances that could be counted on to interact with each other in a palpable and fairly predictable fashion – though the exact scale of the ensuing reaction could not be quite so reliably gauged.” – in retrospect though I wonder if this chapter represents the narrator’s early development as a writer.

At one stage in this book the narrator talks about her Swindon upbringing and the Yorkshire upbringing of her once boyfriend and how both were from areas where a relatively conventional life (job in a family trade, marriage, starter home, children, bigger home, annual holiday abroad) is the convention and expectation and yet “we couldn’t say why exactly but neither me nor Dale were cut out for that …………. the encroaching inevitability of that life path had been a source of anxiety to us”. The path the narrator instead follows seems though rather ambiguous and undefined – a yet unfulfilled but not unfulfilling search for a “different turn”, which is sometimes progressing but at other times frustrating.

And for me that is a metaphor for Claire-Louise Bennett’s writing – a sense that the conventional literary novel with plot, characters, linearity is not for her – a refusal to fit into pre-existing templates and a search for something new to do with literature. A search though that has perhaps not yet reached fulfilment and is still uneven in its results but still interesting for an observer.

I have to confess that I needed to read Checkout 19 twice before I felt in any way capable of having coherent thoughts about it. This is somewhat similar to my reaction to the author’s book Pond which is brilliant but which I described at the time I read it as “disconcerting”.

On first reading, I found Checkout 19 to be a bit overwhelming. It comes at you as a kind of stream-of-consciousness tsunami. There are times when you pause to think about what you are reading and cannot remember how the narrative got onto that topic.

That said, there is something about the writing that tells you this is a book worth persevering with. When I finished it, I immediately turned back to the first page and began again. This second reading, perhaps because I had some foreknowledge, became a very rewarding experience. A large part of me wants to praise Bennett for writing a book that requires two readings (although I recognise that this might be a failing in me rather than a credit to the book!).

The book consists of seven sections of varying length. One section occupies nearly half the book, others are only about a tenth as long as that. Several themes or characters recur, some getting a fleeting mention early on and then being fleshed out later. For a resident of North Wiltshire (I am one of these), the book contains several references to the largest town in the area which is never mentioned by name but which we locals recognise by mention of, for example, McIlroys (I used to shop here occasionally), Devon Savouries (yes, I know Wiltshire and Devon are different places) and “the fastest growing town in Europe”.

Often the narrative focus moves in very unexpected directions leading to my confusion during my initial reading. Part of this is caused by the blending/blurring of “fact” and “fiction”: we often jump between apparent memories and fictional stories with the border between the two becoming less and less well-defined.

This is also a very literary book packed full of references to other books the narrator has or hasn’t read with some of these generating spin-off threads that gradually weave into overall tapestry of the book.

Because this isn’t a book with a plot or a story. It’s a book about atmosphere and impression, a book about literature and words that takes us into the mind of our narrator. Sometimes it feels as though there are too many words, but I felt that less on a second reading than on a first and I suspect would feel it even less on a third reading.

"How did he go on living, how have I gone on living, it wasn’t at all clear to either of us then that we would go on living. I’m glad of course that I did go on living, not least because since then I’ve read lots and lots more books by writers such as Fleur Jaeggy and Ingeborg Bachmann and Diana Athill and Doris Lessing and Marlen Haushofer and Shirley Jackson and Tove Ditlevsen and Ágota Kristóf and Muriel Spark and Eudora Welty and Inger Christensen and Anna Kavan and Jane Bowles and Silvina Ocampo and Angela Carter and Leonora Carrington and Tove Jansson and Mercè Rodoreda.

There came a point I don’t know when exactly when I’d read enough books by men for the time being. It happened quite naturally–I don’t recall deciding I’d had enough and wasn’t going to read any more books by men for a while, it was just that I began reading more and more books by women and that didn’t leave me much time anymore to read any books by men."

Claire-Louise Bennett's debut novel Pond was my favourite novel of 2016 and one I'd rank in the top 10 of the decade, so I have her mentally filed alongside similarly brilliant wordsmiths under "I would happily read her shopping list," and here, via her narrative avatar, I had that pleasure:

"We probably don’t have the kinds of things you like,’ said Dale’s mother, and I wondered what exactly Dale had told her about me. I felt uncomfortable with the idea of her buying things especially for me but she egged me on in such a gleeful sort of way that I was soon lobbing all sorts of stuff into the trolley that Dale was pushing up and down and around the corners so as not to be a great big spoilsport. Earl Grey tea–they didn’t have any lapsang souchong–strawberries, pineapple juice, grapefruit, minty chocolate, crackers, yoghurt, sardines, avocados, iced fingers, humous, cheddar, blue cheese, camembert, grapes, pickle, fig rolls, Jamaican ginger cake, tomatoes, pistachios, baked beans, wholemeal bread, vanilla ice cream. ‘Don’t you eat meat,’ she said, ‘oh yes’ I said, ‘I’m quite partial to a Peperami.’"

I say "novel Pond" but the book is said to have missed out on the Goldsmiths Prize because it was considered a story collection. Bennett herself when asked what she has intended replied "I didn't want it to be anything really. Keeping it away from falling into a shape that already exists was very interesting, and challenging."

In Checkout 19 the narrator looks back on her formative influences and evolution as a writer. It continues the same deliberate blurring of form, here a novel in the form of auto-fictional (?) essays, ones which cohere by repetition of certain incidents and images, lapsang souchong being one example, another the author Ann Quin, and a third the tale of a Russian shopper in the supermarket in which the narrator worked at the eponymous checkout 19.

In Pond she also quite deliberately resisted a narrative arc, which "seems to override every other imaginative possibility", and to write about things more than people ("human beings and the stunts they pull were a minor constituent of my world view"). Here any narrative arc is again lacking, but the focus is much more on people, the narrator in particular.

The narrator has relationships (often with rather abusive men) but is at heart quite alone. As Bennett said, again discussing Pond:

"I respond to atmosphere much more than plot, say, and it seems it gathers much more effectively around a lone voice, just like it does around a single candle flame perhaps. I’ve always been drawn to the misfit, the outcast, the exile, the hopeless case with the wicked sense of humor—I’m thinking of narrators in work by Samuel Beckett, Jean Rhys, Marlen Haushofer, Thomas Bernhard, Clarice Lispector, Renata Adler, Paul Bowles, Anais Nin, Fernando Pessoa. Basic life situations, such as marriage, work, procreation, don’t occur automatically for some people and it’s desirable that fiction reports upon the lives of so-called outsiders because actually when you spend so much time alone you are kind of starting from scratch, on your own terms more or less, every single day, and it’s nullifying and terrifying and occasionally glorious."

This is also a novel steeped in literature, including a number of literary shopping lists similar to that in the quotes above, or this on reading a book:

"We have a tendency don’t we of reading the last few sentences on the right page hurriedly. We do actually. We enjoy turning the pages of a book and our anticipation of doing so is obviously fairly fervid and undermines our attention to such an extent that we can’t help but skim over the last couple of sentences on the right page probably without really taking in a single word. Quite often when we make a start on the left page it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to us. No. No. No it doesn’t. And it is only then, isn’t it, that we realise, somewhat reluctantly, that we didn’t read the last few lines of the previous page properly. Quite often, we are so reluctant to acknowledge that this makes any difference, we carry on reading. We carry on that’s right even though we can’t make head nor tail of what we are reading. We carry on regardless because we are vaguely convinced that, surely, if we keep going, the way these current sentences relate to all the sentences we’ve already read will, actually, sooner or later, make itself perfectly apparent. We don’t get very far. No, we don’t. We nearly always flick back. We do. And we are nearly always surprised by how much salient detail was in fact contained in the last few lines on the previous right page and we are surprised even further by a very unreasonable thought that comes to us from who knows where which proposes that the typesetter of the book is really quite irresponsible, that they should allow such important sentences to appear at the very end of the right page."

The novel consists of seven Parts. Part III Won't You Bring in the Birds is much the longest and also the most striking. At its heart this is based on the narrator's recollection, and elaboration, on a story she wrote many years previously, and it is striking how in recounting it she pinpoints the timing by the novels she had read by that time:

"When I was in my early twenties I began to write a story about a man named Tarquin Superbus. Tarquin Superbus was a very elegant sort of man who lived in a very elegant European city sometime in a previous century. I didn’t mention in the story which century the unfolding events described took place in, I simply wrote ‘long ago’ at the beginning of the tale and left it at that because I wasn’t really sure myself when exactly or where exactly the story happened. In fact my sense of when and where swung back and forth, from one century to another, from one European country to the next. Sometimes as I wrote it seemed to me that my portrayal of this character Tarquin Superbus and the apartment and the city where he lived was very much in tune with the 1800s.

The pages of Superbus’s library were blank, and that was all there was to it. It seems in the retelling I have got carried away. But then I have read so much and written so much since then it is hardly to be wondered at that in the meantime some ideas pertaining to the potency of the written word, based upon direct and seismic experiences, have been developing inside of me and should find their way out–albeit somewhat hackneyed, with something vaguely remembered from Hermann Hesse hovering close by–through the Doctor’s mouth, now that I have opened it once again, some twenty or so years later, in order to impart to Tarquin that his whole library is filled with blank pages, but for one sentence. But for one sentence! No, I could not leave it there. Strange to think but when I first wrote the tale I hadn’t yet read a single word by Italo Calvino, Jean Rhys, Borges, or Thomas Bernhard, nor Clarice Lispector. I had read Of Mice and Men, and Lolita, and ‘Kubla Khan’, and The Diary of a Young Girl. I had not yet read The Go-Between or Wuthering Heights or ‘A Season in Hell’ or Orlando. I had read Jacob’s Room and Nausea and The Fall and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and ‘The Hollow Men’ and many Imagist poems, one of which had snow in it and a white leopard I think, or, more accurately, it was a leopard that had no outline–maybe it was penned by Ezra Pound, I don’t remember. I hadn’t yet read A Sport and a Pastime or Wittgenstein’s Mistress or Moon Tiger or ‘The Pedersen Kid’ or ‘A Girl of the Zeitgeist’ or ‘The Letter of Lord Chandos’ or ‘The Trouble With Following the Rules’."

The story that follows is Sebaldian in the sense that J.J. Long, writing on ‘The Ambulatory Narrative and the Poetics of Digression’ of WG Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, pipointed: that “digression is always constrained by the end-directed coherence that constitutes its very condition of possibility - as that from which it departs” Bennett follows a similar approach,with her retelling of her own short story of Tarquin Superbus - one that at least in her later retelling most struck me as Borgesian - with various digressions into her own life and other topics, but with the narrative thread, or perhaps narrative elastic, keeping the story on track. Again from interview on Pond: “Patterns, connections, associations, they occur quite naturally, don’t they? It’s not something you have to worry about or force or contrive.”

In comparison, the other six parts act rather more like accompanying movements to the central piece, containing echoes of the same themes and phrases, with variations of their own. Indeed I might recommend the reader begins with Part IV, although clearly this wasn’t the author’s intention.

Bennett acknowledges that some of the ideas began in her previous essays:

- I Am Love in the September 2014 edition of Gorse
- Suddenly a Duck in the Summer 2015 edition of Stinging Fly
- and her 2020 Fish Out of Water, in which she explores the portraiture of Dorothea Tanning.

The first two can again be seen as variations on the essays in the novel (or rather, vice versa, given they came first). I’m not familiar with the third to be able to trace the influence and Tanning herself does not appear in Checkout 19.

Reading back my review is clearly rambling, but I think that is appropriate for the style of this book which I found quite hard to appreciate as a whole rather than at the paragraph level. A tentative 4.5 stars, but a book I plan to immediately re-read.

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett is a book about books and the experiences of reading and moments in the life of a reader and how storytelling shapes us.

Sparky prose but some of the essays/sections feel too long and repetitive so a tighter edit would have worked better for me. But when Bennett is on form, she's excellent. Lots of feminist topics here that have become de rigeur though treated with some freshness: periods, boyfriends, female bodies, sex that is in that horrible liminal space of non-consent but not-resisted either. I like the politicised take on life but I expected something a bit edgier.