The man who invented the x-ray, Wilhelm Röntgen, happened upon his discovery by accident, devoting a few weeks to it before moving on. Nevertheless he revolutionised medicine, and changed for ever the way we relate to our bodies. No longer opaque, obscure things, they were now – at this very beginning, in 1895 – more knowable. But this did not mean that they were any less inscrutable.
What we can know of our bodies, ourselves, or each other is the subject of Jessie Greengrass’s debut novel. The author of an award-winning short story collection, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It, Greengrass adapts to the novel format with enviable flexibility. Or rather, she adapts it to her own specific literary sensibilities: ruminative, taking a judicious distance from things, just far enough to see the links between them, but not so far she misses their textures.
Sight is narrated by a nameless young woman who, pregnant with her second child, meditates on her mother’s death and its aftermath, her relationship with her psychoanalyst grandmother, and how difficult it was to decide to have her first baby. The narrative brushes back and forth in time, bringing unexpected connections to the surface. One section details the period after her mother’s death when she would spend days and days reading aimlessly about science and history, seeking “a way to understand myself by analogy, a pattern recognised in other lives which might be drawn across my own to give it shape and, given shape, to give it impetus, direction”. She would page through medical textbooks, looking at images of “bodies dissected or described”, reading case files and contemplating “all the many ways there are to see inside ourselves and still I feel that, correctly understood, they might constitute a key – ”.
The long trails of thought sometimes break off this way, on a dash and a line break; Greengrass employs the same device to register dialogue, as if speaking were just an interruption in the flow of our internal monologue (which, perhaps, it is after all). It reminded me of one of Jacques Lacan’s techniques during phone sessions: just as it sounded as though his patient was getting to some sort of epiphany, he would hang up. (This may be apocryphal.) That is because he believed there are no final answers or explanations; the therapy, and whatever understanding it involves, is all in the talking.
This connection to psychoanalysis isn’t gratuitous; the narrator’s grandmother is a psychoanalyst in Hampstead with a Seneca-esque attachment to keeping scrupulous diaries of her days, telling her granddaughter that “without reflection, without the capacity to trace our lives backward and pick the patterns out, we become liable to act as animals do, minus forethought and according to a set of governing laws which we have never taken the trouble to explore”.
By using words like ruminative or meditative to describe the book, I am not implying it is messy or haphazard. On the contrary, the writing is poised – but as if on the edge of a precipice. Hovering between the novel and the essay, unfolding through long, languorous sentences, Sight builds meaning through juxtaposition, through surprising mirrorings and parallels; the narrator even keeps a bulletin board where she places certain photographic talismans that recur across the narrative.
The novel shares DNA with the work of WG Sebald or Teju Cole, or even Patrick Keiller, blending first-person writing with musings on figures such as Röntgen, the relationship between Sigmund and Anna Freud, and the surgeon-cum-collector behind the Hunterian Museum, John Hunter. Nothing sticks out; everything is folded into the patient laying out of language and thought. If anything, this means the narrative is oddly sexless what interests the narrator is more the separation than the joining of bodies.
And, importantly, the enclosure of bodies. Greengrass writes stunningly about the experience of pregnancy and motherhood, and the pages she devotes to Jan van Rymsdyk, an 18th-century artist who specialised in drawing cadavers, are among the best in the book. His drawings of a dead pregnant woman and her unborn baby prompt a reflection on the relationship between parents and children, the trust that is not a response to the love we provide but which “predates ourselves”, which can be read in the way the foetus is curled up on the placenta, in the way children lie when they sleep. “Love exists regardless of ourselves and is unearned or got on credit,” Greengrass writes, “these gestures echoing those already made and made again, the child inside me turning over as I go about my business unaware, the only power that we are given to maintain or to destroy, and that is why it is such agony to hold a sleeping child: the certainty it brings us that trust is a gift, fragile like an egg in certain places, and so we must be careful with it”.
It’s the inability to know anything for sure that Greengrass tracks across her story; we fear the things we can’t see, and validate or classify, but they are the very things that make us live. As her narrator waits for the arrival of her second child, wondering if she has the right to inflict the experiment of life on it at all, she is able to come to a kind of resolution, not very different from that of Hunter, the would-be surgeon and collector of the macabre and the bizarre, who wrote to one of his pupils: “But why do you ask me a question, by the way of solving it. I think your solution is just; but why think, why not trie the Expt.”
• Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is published by Vintage. Sight is published by JM Originals. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.999) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
