Power, Morality, and the “Female Gaze”: On Eliza Clark’s “Boy Parts”
Eliza Clark | Boy Parts | Influx Press | July 2023 | 304 Pages
I was curious about Boy Parts by Eliza Clark for a long time, particularly because of the way it has been celebrated for its interrogation of “gender.” Clark, who was named in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list, has two books slated for a 2023 and 2024 release—Penance, a novel, and She’s Always Hungry, a collection of short stories. Her debut offers an exciting taste of what’s to come by way of innovative, biting prose alongside characters and a plot that startle as much as comfort.
Clark has produced an exceptional book and a complicated commentary on power told from the perspective of a thoroughly horrible individual. Perhaps due to the seemingly harmless and chic premise of a working class female photographer, Irina Sturges, getting a big break, I expected this book to position itself within a lush landscape of romance and personal growth surrounded by Italian villas and cigarette smoke. Instead, it wrapped me around its finger and spat me out horrified.
At the outset, I didn’t find Boy Parts inherently interrogative when it came to gendered power dynamics. A woman photographing men sexually did a lot to invert the male gaze, but didn’t necessarily overturn power dynamics altogether. However, Irina seemed well aware of this and was an extraordinary narrator. A thrilling, exciting, and disturbing voice to read, she asked questions that were vivid, even frightening, often accusatory to herself, to the reader, and to the ways that power functioned between people: “Was it my idea to have him hurt me, or did he just let me think it was?”
I initially felt drawn to Irina, with an almost instinctive desire to find her relatable, to feel mirrored in her self-proclaimed superiority over everyone around her. As she grew increasingly unhinged, I started questioning this desire. Within the first few pages, we learn she has accidentally created child porn and instead of deleting it, she files it away in an encrypted folder. That was my initial red flag to hate her, and I did! I hated how annoying she was, how self-absorbed, how mean to her friends she was. But I envied how everyone else saw her. I envied the hold she had on people, and I ached to feel that same hold over others.
The revelation of her murderous past, which had been hinted at across the book, engages the novel’s celebrated interrogation of gendered violence. Irina kills a young kid, probably around sixteen, referring to him creepily as “my boy.” The nearly mother-like nature of her affectation towards him is skin-crawling, as is her desperate and ever-growing fear that things she does have no consequence or material impact. Instead, they disappear: she goes to dig up her boy’s skull and finds it gone; she photographs glass shards and finds empty wounds; she tells a man that she once killed someone and he laughs it off.
It felt all the more gruesome to have found any relatability in Irina when the truth of her past came out. After the murder of her “boy,” Irina went on to live a perfectly normal and matter-of-fact life, with a complicated interiority and a complete lack of perspective, no doubt designed to be grating and unbelievable, manifesting in her managing to feel irritated at people giving her favors in her arts career. She wasn’t just unlikeable, she was detestable. She had a ten-step skincare routine, for god’s sake, what were we supposed to expect?
From the beginning (quoting Susan Sontag’s famous line about the aggressiveness inherent in the act of photographing someone in the book’s epigraph), Boy Parts displays a preoccupation with the enactment of power and control in the settings created around photography, embodied further in the act itself.
The way that Clark complicates the victim/villain binary in Boy Parts is particularly effective. Irina is raped in the initial pages of the book, in a set of circumstances many women recognize or have been at risk of, garnering readers’ sympathy. Solidarity, even. We are terrified that her best friend questions Irina’s honesty. This is despite the fact that Irina clearly was not of pristine character—she was violent, immoral, abusive right from the beginning. But somehow, the black-and-white nature of murder takes it too far: this is not a condition we are willing to accept, particularly when compounded with everything else she has done since. She took on many roles towards her subjects, enacting violence towards them in ways that varied in their perpetration as much as their receipt. We learn about Irina’s “practice” as an artist early on, and this understanding becomes more complicated and complex with each encounter with a subject.
Irina plainly coerces her relatively new friend Eddie from Tesco into letting her choke him during sex—he passes out, furious at her, but comes back to her anyway, seemingly convinced she would be good to him if he said the right thing to her. This moment sits uncomfortably next to the memory of Irina herself being raped earlier in the book; it is thrown into even sharper, horrifying relief when we learn she choked her ‘boy’ to death. Elsewhere, there’s the implicitly older man she brings home (her studio, as she’s very particular about reminding us) to photograph. He aggressively, repeatedly, asks her if he’s boring her, hitting her when she refuses to entertain his thinly veiled threats laced with a command to submit. Irina badly injures him in return, and this is where we encounter the intrigue that her murderous past is shrouded in; he’s passed out, she’s scared but she’s been here before, she knows what to do—she tells us so herself. Finally, he wakes up, and they mutually agree not to go to the police; a moment of physical, possibly fatal violence against each other ends up in something resembling solidarity. The two realize their own respective situations would be worsened by any encounter with the police, and here, I wondered, what in the world does Irina Sturges have in common with a violent misogynist? Something, it turned out.
A murderer can be a victim of violence too and, perhaps I am affording too much of an agenda to a novel that was deeply morally confusing, but I felt a finger pointing at myself as the reader, daring me to lessen my empathy towards Irina in light of her full story. It is a confounding and visceral testament to the fickleness of solidarity and morality, to the extent of being almost pointed, accusatory—and rightly so.