Credit: Courtesy
Being thrust into a different place and time is one of the pleasures of reading fiction. Sometimes the place is inside the mind of a character whose experience of life might amuse or terrify the reader. The effect depends on the skill of the storyteller; if the storyteller is skilled, I don’t mind not knowing exactly what’s going on or feeling disturbed or unsettled. This is how I felt reading Albertine Clarke’s The Body Builders. Clarke creates an intense interiority which is at times claustrophobic. Ada, her protagonist, is a heavy presence, and often a dark one.
Clarke provides several hints early on that things are not quite right with Ada. As a young girl, she fell down the steps in her house and broke her wrist. Her parents weren’t home and she waited on the cold floor, neither moving or crying out, until her father came home and asked why she hadn’t gotten up to call for help. Ada tells him that she wanted someone to find her. More than anything, Ada longs to be seen by her parents, acknowledged by them, loved by them — a desire that extends through the novel. Soon after, Ada’s father deserts his family and goes off to establish his own life, at the center of which is body building; he’s far more comfortable pumping iron than caring for his daughter. Ada’s relationship with her mother is, to say the least, complicated. When a mother tells her daughter, “I can’t see how you could be mine, and we’re not the same,” it leads to mistrust and hurt, and in Ada’s case, a void she struggles to fill.
Which is perhaps why she feels so estranged from herself, as if some outside entity is controlling her thoughts and actions, as if she’s being taken over body and mind. It was here that my discomfort was most acute, unsure if what Ada was experiencing was happening inside her head or being manipulated by an external entity. It seems to be the latter, and yet doubt remains. Is Atticus a real flesh and blood person or a projection of Ada’s mind? What’s real, anyway? Who decides? The same can be said for Darius, a voice on the phone, who appears in Ada’s room in the facility, but again, is this real or projection?
I was impressed by Clarke’s ability to create and maintain such a deep sense of interiority, even as I struggled to feel an affinity for Ada. The discomfort and disequilibrium I felt stayed with me, and caused me to question my own perceptions, a testament to Clarke’s control of the narrative. Ada is desperate to be liked, loved, and accepted, but achieving these states might be too big an ask.
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.
