Ruth & Pen

Emilie Pine

Hamish Hamilton, £14.99

Review: Rosemary Goring

EMILIE Pine wastes no time in laying out the territory of her debut novel. Ruth & Pen is the fictional follow-up to her acclaimed collection of essays, Notes to Self. That deeply personal series of accounts offered politicised reflections based on her experience of an alcoholic father, difficult youth, and miscarriage. It also touched on the abuse women endure, in various shapes, through the course of their lives.

It’s little surprise that, as a Professor of Drama at University College, Dublin, Pine knows how to tell a story. What is striking, however, is how confidently she has switched from memoir to fiction, as if she has been writing novels for years.

On the first page Ruth, a middle-aged Irish therapist, wakens and goes to the bathroom. This mundane act triggers recollections of the terrible phone conversation she and her husband had the evening before. He chose not to return home, and this morning his side of the bed is cold.

As Ruth prepares for work, the reasons for her failing marriage remain unclear, but there’s no doubt that the hospital appointment she must attend that day is part of it. As is instantly clear, one strand of Pine’s intense and powerful story is dictated by female physiology. In Ruth’s case, hers is a body that has suffered more than its share of problems, not least fertility issues and a recent devastating miscarriage. Hence the question of whether she and her husband of many years are on the verge of splitting.

Pine’s other eponymous character is 16-year old Pen, who is preparing for possibly the biggest day of her life. Skipping school to attend an Extinction Rebellion protest, she intends to ask her best friend Alice out on a date. What would be unnerving enough for anyone is even more challenging for Pen. Diagnosed with autism, she finds communicating her feelings exceedingly hard. But while her mother tells her that there is no normal, “Pen will be normal if it kills her”.

Taking place on a single day in Dublin, October 7, 2019, Ruth & Pen is a tale told in tandem, although such contact as there is between the two women, who don’t know each other, is fleeting and incidental. Narrated mainly in the third person, their thoughts unspool in a controlled version of stream of consciousness, as when Ruth is having lunch in a cafe: “The chicken is tasty, good, and Ruth thinks again of being vegetarian. It wasn’t justifiable, really, eating other living things. But then it feels overwhelming to consider all your life choices at every meal. Maybe those two girls were vegetarian, maybe they would save them all…”

Minute by minute, hour by hour, readers follow Ruth and Pen through their day, and through the streets, cafes and bars of Dublin. It’s as if we are a webcam catching them as they pass by: Ruth in her office, where she deals with other people’s issues more effectively than with her own; or in the hospital, enduring yet another internal examination. Pen, heading for the climate march, trying to blot out memories of a cruel incident at school a year earlier, after which she started to see a therapist (“it became best half-hour of the week”). She is both excited and anxious about how the day will unfold, and with good reason.

There’s no avoiding the influence of James Joyce’s Ulysses in any fiction that covers this city like a traveller following a memory map, in the space of 24 hours. To the very last page, with its direct nod to Molly Bloom, Joyce’s presence is palpable. Although Pine’s prose shares little of his poetry or vision, her voice is distinctive and strong. This is fiction that delineates character, mood and a person’s past through the lathering of shampoo or a kettle being put on to boil: “Ruth looks in the mirror, sees her still-creased face, sees her body in the navy suit, thinks, oh, this is who I am. But the thought is drowned by the roar of the hairdryer.”

The subjects Pine handles suit this prosaic, unhurried approach. As becomes evident, the significance of what both women have experienced, and are coping with now, is heightened rather than diminished by being refracted through the most ordinary of every-day doings. Such a technique risks becoming tedious, and occasionally it demands patience. Nevertheless, it is a tight framing device for a story whose components stretch back years. Some of its gratifications are those of film: vivid, immediate, the characters’ surroundings and accessories crucial to its mood.

All this Pine executes with panache. Less assured, or convincing, is the implied parallel between Ruth and Pen. Why she has chosen someone with autism remains unclear, unless it is to highlight that everybody struggles, a fact Pen recognises herself: “even for people without sensory processing differences, emotions can be really hard to read. Basically, thinks Pen, the entire rom-com genre is proof that feelings aren’t easy.”

If so, however, the situations the two are going through, and what they must navigate today and in the future, seem very differently weighted. If the implication is that Pen can surmount problems equally effectively in her own way, I remain unconvinced.

The decision to play one woman’s story off the other, showing their touching points and differences, is the novel’s weakness, creating a sense of an awkward twinning, with neither in step with the other. Pine’s artful symmetries feel just that: artful, not natural. Yet they are more irksome in hindsight than when reading, as Pine sweeps readers up in a plot that tugs the heartstrings, and keeps a will-they/won’t they momentum to the very end.

Illuminating the shapes grief and anger take, the novel has moments of acuity when focussed on Ruth. Although rather too overtly propelled by ‘issues’, it illuminates a wider cast of characters than its central pair, most notably Ruth’s husband Aidan. Like his wife, he is swithering over the whether they should stay together: “Fix me, he wants to say. Or release me.” Pine’s point is quietly made: if only it were that simple.