Ali is a radio producer; Ed is a comedian. Ali is vulnerable; Ed is charming. Ali is desperate to be loved; Ed is ready to love her.
And Ed is a predator. Ali is prey.
Julia Raeside’s debut novel, Don’t Make Me Laugh, begins like a romcom, and ends like a different kind of fantasy: the kind in which people get what they deserve. In between, though, it feels painfully, precisely, beat-for-beat accurate. Sleazy Ed and bedraggled Ali are both so believable you could Google them. Until said denouement, there is nothing here that doesn’t ring absolutely true: famous men behaving badly? Famous men behaving very badly? Famous men taking advantage of their fame, and powerful men taking advantage of their power?
The difficulty with this as a novel is that it does feel so true: none of it is new; none of it is even really shocking. In a world where a sexual predator is in the White House for the second time, Harvey Weinstein has appealed his convictions, and Louis CK won a Grammy for his post-cancellation return to standup, it feels strangely naive for a character to fume over “heels, the patriarchy … underwire, the patriarchy … everything, the patriarchy”, as if naming it might make it go away. Remember when you had just learned about the patriarchy, and you thought knowing about it would give you the power to fight against it? Remember when we thought that we could turn this ship around?
Ali can “remember her first time as a sex object like it was yesterday”, but it doesn’t stop her falling for someone who, from the start, is obviously bad news. Many women faced with Ed’s dismissive, days-later response to a nude shot (“delightful pic x”) might be tempted to block and move on. Ali’s desperate lack of self-esteem may make a certain kind of sense, but it also makes for uncomfortable reading.
“Any man would be lucky to rape you,” she tells a friend who feels unattractive: it’s hard to escape the fact that this is a book that focuses not on the male emotional violence it purports to unpick, but on the bodies of those who bear the brunt of it.
Women’s bodies come in for special attention, but the men are also scrupulously observed. The novel opens with a description of the “generous round” of Ed’s “belly, hanging over his jeans”; the epilogue makes sure to let us know that Ed’s shirts no longer fit him, and he is now forced to wear something that “looks like a nightie”. Weight is a constant and uneasy preoccupation: Ali charts her own weight loss meticulously, and she observes other women’s bodies with the same laser-focused gaze. Her internalised misogyny makes it difficult, sometimes, to tell this gaze apart from the infamous male gaze. It’s as if the rot goes so deep that the plot frequently comes second to the pain. Does the accurate duplication of suffering act as a tool to dismantle the structures that shaped it, or is it just … more of the same?
This is the fine line that Raeside attempts to walk, and one that is managed deftly in the novel’s best passage. Ali opens a computer folder to find “a palette of peach tones … like the stained glass at Coventry Cathedral”: every nude picture Ed has ever received from women, including her own. There are so many that they become mere pixels of “cream and pink and beige”. Ali zooms in to find “piercings, tattoos, fat rolls, stubble … stretch marks, loose skin draping, stomachs spilling over elastic, bones jutting from hips”. She imagines “rows of shelves, jars filling every horizontal, in each jar a specimen”. She dreams, and feels gills in her own neck. It is Ali’s bad luck to be both specimen and scientist, and the bad luck of tackling this particular subject that reading Ali’s thoughts on other women – other specimens – should feel so unsettlingly brutal.
Ali’s self-loathing is so much bigger than herself. Her best friend, Ava, has “swapped fancying comedians for 30 plants a week and mindful drinking”, moving to the countryside with newborn IVF twins, an act that Ali views as “almost aggressive”. Ava plays no real role in the novel, except as an example of the kind of woman Ali disdains. Ali’s mother, also, is the wrong kind of woman; as is a stranger eating a boiled egg (the white caught “in the bristles on her top lip”), a life model (no signs of “inner life”), anyone who has ever sent a nude (“get some self-respect”), anyone who Ali perceives as “achieving hairlessness without pain or ugliness” (“all other women”), anyone who Ali perceives as “wearing things based on who they wanted to be that day” (again, all other women), an ageing radio presenter (her once “neat and silky” body now besmirched by “plump features … like modern extensions to an old house”), a model in an advert for self-tanner (described in painstaking detail alongside ketchup dripping off a burger bun) and a dead girl. Ali can’t decide if she envies the dead girl or not; she certainly envies the attention the dead girl gets. The dead girl, of course, has died having liposuction in Turkey.
No ending, happy-adjacent or not, can shake the feeling that Don’t Make Me Laugh is a novel in which men are monstrous, but other women might be the real enemy. Which is, of course, the patriarchy’s biggest and most dangerous fantasy of all.
• Don’t Make Me Laugh by Julia Raeside is published by Bedford Square (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
