Published in February 2009, Jenn Ashworth’s debut novel marked the discovery of a truly original voice. Much has been said of her gift for darkly comic narrative, but I was also struck by the warmth with which she describes her main character; a flawed lonely young woman whose life is constantly falling short of her expectations.
Annie has just moved into a new home. Obsessed with making a good impression on her new neighbours, she arms herself with numerous self-help books, which she indexes and summarises in a large colour-coded folder. Strangely the impression is more of a girl starting secondary school, trying to reinvent herself to her peers when one is still optimistic that such changes might be possible – that anything can be achieved with some new stationary and the right advice from J17. Not so strange perhaps as we later learn that Annie’s mother died when she was twelve and the subsequent unravelling of her home-life with her emotionally abusive father meant secondary school was even more of a trial than usual. Having been denied a fresh start in adolescence Annie looks for it elsewhere – when she meets and marries her dentist husband Will and moves to Fleetwood, or when an old friend comes back into her life, or indeed when she moves into her new house. Annie isn’t short of chances and the reader finds oneself hoping desperately that she is able to make the most of them. But despite her self-help literature, Annie lacks the tools to create the sort of life she wants for herself and the results of her attempts are by turns heartbreaking and hilarious.
With its intense first-person narrative, Ashworth’s novel is concerned with our understanding of the ‘truth’ and the idea that we are all unreliable narrators of our own past. Despite spending the whole novel in the almost claustrophobic grip of the narrator we only ever glimpse Annie’s problems at a remove, seeing through her eyes it is hard to tell the ‘reality’ of situations and how they might differ, perhaps radically, from Annie’s perception of them. Annie herself admits towards the end of the novel that it is quite possible the characters she describes wouldn’t recognise themselves in her account of them.
Yet we recognise ourselves in Annie, even as she confides to us the full extent of her misadventures, there is something universal in her longing to find ‘a certain kind of intimacy’. We never even achieve intimacy with Annie herself, seeing her only through her unreliable memories, embroidered, patched-over, misunderstood, she remains as much of an enigma as the people around her. Ashworth’s gift is in never tipping too far into melodrama, this is black humour in the true sense that there is at all times an undercurrent of real pain. In this way Annie manages – almost inexplicably – to attract our sympathy. This reader certainly found herself firmly on Annie’s side when a formerly kind-seeming neighbour is unveiled as gossipy and two-faced. Similarly, when Annie suggests putting their baby into nursery and husband Will chides her for her selfishness, glibly quoting some research from the ‘Winnicot book’ that looks at ‘what early separation from the mother does to the minds of young infants’, one can fully understand Annie’s rage towards him.
Yet this is not a bleak read; although budding catastrophe is apparent almost from the first page, Annie’s eternal optimism and belief that she can better herself lends it a queer sort of cheerfulness. The ending is oblique but I couldn’t quite extinguish the hope that Annie might indeed go on to find the sort of love she is looking for.
A Kind of Intimacy is a gripping read but it is also a meditation upon loneliness and the myriad casual cruelties we can inflict upon our neighbours, friends and relatives. Upon finishing the book a friend of mine complained she felt in need of a hot shower. I get the impression Ashworth would be delighted to hear so.
Jenn Ashworth is a writer, editor and teacher. Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy was included in the Waterstone’s New Voices promotion and short-listed for Sam Jordison’s Not The Booker Award at The Guardian. In 2010 it got a Betty Trask award from the Society of Authors. Her second novel, Cold Light, was published by Sceptre in 2011.
Jenn’s most recent of many contributions to LWH was an interview with A J Duggan in January 2011.
Daisy Baldwin grew up in Kirkham, which boasts a Fox’s biscuit factory and ‘Europe’s largest stockist of new and used plastic boxes’. She studied English at the University of Oxford and is a graduate of the Manchester Centre for New Writing. She currently lives and works in London, tweets @daisystella and blogs very occasionally at paperfacegirl.wordpress.com
[...] Ashworth is a Preston born novelist – her first novel, A Kind Of Intimacy, was published in 2009 and won a Betty Trask award. Her second, Cold Light, came out earlier this [...]