Rebecca Watson (1)

This powerful novel is told in streams of consciousness. The plural is intentional here; Watson does a stellar job of representing, through both language and formatting, the default internal state in which several modes of consciousness and rumination occur simultaneously. She also accurately depicts the power of intrusive thoughts and the lengths to which people go to banish them.

At the start of the novel, we learn that the unnamed narrator has woken up with a hangover, that she has a boyfriend to whom she’s deeply attached, and an office job that she despises. The rest is revealed gradually, and Watson’s skillful introduction of “the rest” in a way that lets readers guess exactly what it is before the protagonist makes it explicit is what transforms this novel into 200 pages of continuous gut-punch. It is a tour de force.… (more)