Grief without Meditation: On Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's "The Discomfort of Evening"

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchinson) | The Discomfort of Evening | Graywolf | August 2020 | 296 Pages

It isn’t ever entirely clear why Jas, the young narrator of The Discomfort of Evening, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel, refuses for years to remove her outdoor coat. From the book’s first line, “I was ten and stopped taking off my coat,” this sartorial habit seems a reaction to the traumatic death of Jas’s older brother, the event which launches the novel. But Jas never explicitly admits that the compulsion is a form or side effect of mourning and only obliquely alludes to the increasingly filthy coat’s ability to protect from disease, to trap her body inside it, to ward off nightly terrors.

This ambiguity of angst, the unwieldy trajectory of human growth, is the trouble with trying to track the impact of grief, particularly grief in children, who face the blobbish barrage of adult emotions they cannot articulate or follow. It is impossible, after all, for those of us whose childhoods are rent the way Jas’ has been, to know whether certain disturbing behaviors were long preordained side effects of existence—whether we were bound inevitably for moroseness, periods of hormonal antics—or whether they derive from the specific disruption of trauma.

The nebulous nature of trauma is also the trouble with The Discomfort of Evening, an astonishing chronicle of grief that occasionally seems lost in the myopia of its own misery. The book is harsh, joyless; every scene of Jas’s life dimmed by a steady drum of suffering. The family unravels as the novel progresses: Jas’s parents grow distant; the cows which serve as the focal point of their Dutch reformist farming family are beset by disease; Jas and her siblings act out, inflicting pain on themselves and each other and engaging in incest that leaves matters of agency disturbingly ambiguous.

Certainly, some of the family’s dysfunction, especially early on, can be attributed directly to the shock of death in the household. But Rijneveld conjures a world in constant, static distress, even absent an instigating force. In the brief glimpse of “normalcy” we are afforded by way of the novel’s opening scene, it is clear that Jas’s mind has always been an unusually turbulent site, even before her brother Matthies’ death. As Jas watches her family eat the last breakfast they will share intact, an unattributed uneasiness seems to guide her thoughts. She considers the genitalia of the angels adorning her mother’s decorative napkins, imagines eyeballs pressed through her skull, pictures a beloved rabbit hanging in a noose. Her thoughts slide easily to the grotesque: she imagines crumpling the napkins in her hand and thinks of “the angels being scrunched up in my fist like mosquitos so that their wings broke, or having their white angel’s hair dirtied with strawberry jam.” Seemingly apropos of nothing, she is seized by a sense of dread over her family’s wellbeing. “What I wanted,” she reflects, “was to keep everyone safe indoors and spread them out across the farm like slices of cooked sausage.” There is a current of angst, a subliminal sense of something askew, even prior to any plot-related rupture. The freak accident that kills Matthies and the subsequent bleakness that pervades the novel, then, seems less an interruption than an inevitability, an exacerbation of a bleak status quo.

That the novel’s unmitigated pain might be more a facet of Jas’s world than a specific result of Matthies’ death raises the question, persistent throughout the novel: is Jas so disturbed because this is what death does to children? Or is Discomfort a book about a preternaturally troubled state of existence, one intensified—but not induced—by the hovering persistence of death?

The book does not answer, or seek to answer, this question—a mostly prudent choice because doing so might open it up to a potential pitfall of writing about loss: presenting a pathology of grief. That the vague grimness of Jas’s external world is inextricable from the specific pain spurred by trauma inhibits psychoanalysis of her actions or narration. In this world, bad things happen, belying explanation or justification. At one point, Jas and her brother Obbe encourage two rabbits to copulate. The smaller rabbit dies. “There’s nothing spectacular to look at,” Jas observes coolly. “It closed its eyes and departed. No convulsions or cries of pain; not a glimpse of death.” Happenings in the novel can feel deliberately arbitrary, a fuck youto fate, to the notion that the things that happen to us are ordained, and therefore matter.

This is not to say that Discomfort is haphazardly constructed. On the contrary, the novel is frank about its obsessions, evincing a craftedness so fragile and deliberate one wonders how anything in this novel might be accidental. Images resurface so compulsively that I had the occasional sense I was reading a distended poem. I do not mean formally; the writing is clearly prose, and clearly not a prose poem; but Rijneveld (who has published two collections of poetry) repeatedly fixates on specific motifs, placing them in sequence until they cohere into meaning. Cows plod across every other page, or else reappear as globular dairy products, which morph into Jas’s indigestion, concern with defecation which becomes a heady baseness anchored in the repeated presence of shit. Animals die, people die, animals die; people are animals; some death is murder, though murder requires agency, which may or may not exist; objects stick in bodies, bodies stick in earth, everyone harbors some sexual perversion which leads to abjection and an infatuation with the grotesque. If the action of the novel can feel aimless, its language is studied, latent with meaning.

In its finest moments, these motifs combine for an effect both gutting and sublime. At the end of the second section, Jas offers a wrenching description of mass bovine slaughter. “There are broken-off tails on the gratings,” she observes laconically. “Horns. Chunks of hoof.” Her father screams bible verses into the sky, and her brother shouts that the men who have come to execute the family’s sick cows are “Murderers! Hitler!” Jas reflects:

I think about the Jewish people who met their fate like hunted-down cattle, about Hitler who was so terrified of illnesses that he started to see people as bacteria, as something you can easily stamp out. The teacher told us during the history lesson that Hitler had fallen through ice when he was four and had been saved by a priest, that some people can fall through ice and it’s better if they’re not rescued. I wondered then why a bad person like Hitler could be saved and not my brother. Why the cows had to die while they hadn’t done anything wrong.

Most of the novel’s fever pitch derives from its balance between forces: Jas’s emotions combine with the assiduousness of the book’s construction to drive the novel, even as the sense of meaninglessness, of entrapment in an aloof world, grounds the narrative. Occasionally, though, this unrelenting grimness can seem to outweigh the elements that push the book forward, can feel so vast and undirected as to sap the book of momentum. Another way of putting this criticism is that, at times, the novel seems to be functioning in such a high poetic gear that readers may struggle to stay invested in its prosaic qualities. Especially in the middle section, when the novel reaches something like stasis between tragedies, I found myself wondering, to put it thickly, when something was going to happen. Things dohappen, of course—a slew of awful things seem always to be happening—but the book is light on plot in the sense of incidences that stack on each other; most of its arc derives from the steady accumulation of feeling as Jas makes her way through a series of events that sometimes impact each other but more often don’t, a slow burn of misery that sears with the addition of sufficient flammable ingredients. The novel, as a result, can occasionally stall, despite the ferocity of its lines (and they are, without fail, stunningly crafted sentences), despite its commitment to the force of its emotions.

But even this problem of stagnation is difficult to criticize, exactly, because the lack of traditional plot seems inextricable from the novel’s commentary on grief. What to make of this novel which seems to insist that nothing derives from anything, causality is fake, and nothing matters; that everything is bleak, was bleak, will remain inescapably bleak, while also infusing a divine sense of craftedness into every line? Perhaps this is the point. A refutation of the idea that Jas’s character can be interpreted, that there is meaning or explanation in tragedy. But an acknowledgment that meaning comes anyhow, somehow; that meaning comes a with terrifying, ugly, word-perfect force.

And so, to return to the question of Jas’s coat, of how children behave when they cannot bear or even name the feelings roiling inside of them, of whether it is possible to extricate the effects of these feelings from the personhood they shape. You can’t do this, of course; you cannot really say x, y, andz components of a personality derive from trauma and everything else is regular. But the analysis, ultimately, is beside the point. When you are a child experiencing grief, it does not matter much why it is miserable, why the pain will not stop, only that this is so. Discomfort, told in Jas’s voice, is not a meditation on grief because children do not meditate. They suffer and express that suffering as best they can.

Jas’s child’s-eye narration defamiliarizes grief so that we can see how painful it is to mourn when mourning is its most base, but moreover, how odd it is to mourn at all. In one line, Jas recalls a lesson from school about the black lace-weaver spider. It is the custom of this breed of insect, apparently, that “once she’s given birth, the mother gives herself to her young. The tiny hungry spiders devour the mother: every last bit of her, until not even a leg is left. They don’t mourn her for a second.” How strange, how futile our human mourning seems in comparison to the efficient ways of these spiders, who merely optimize what is inevitable.