In Rebecca Watson’s debut novel, a young woman scratches herself. She scratches furtively, in hidden places — behind her knees, inside her elbows. She isn’t really itchy. She just needs to scratch. She needs to scratch until she bleeds.
Little Scratch. Like a mini Old Scratch. That devil.
The narrator is “I” and “me,” a young woman who works as an admin in a newspaper office. Her boyfriend is “my him.” Her boss is “my boss,” her desk “the dreaded desk.” And there’s the “pre me … who was merry,” the “old me,” the “little, happy, past me,” the “me” who ended when her boss raped her on that desk.
Little Scratch is a day in “my” life, from waking up hung over, to soul-deadening office work with the same boss, to a poetry reading at a pub, to falling asleep that night. The typographical form of her account suggests that of a poem, or maybe a spreadsheet with intersecting rows and columns. It takes a while to get acclimated to the pattern, but once you get it, you’ll find yourself flowing right into the narrator’s troubled skin, living her simultaneity of sense experience and discursive thought.
Extreme-close-up sequences place Little Scratch among the kinds of autofiction that draw us in, a la Knausgaard, with the convincing authenticity of the real minutae of a real person’s ordinary existence. We don’t need to know, however, if Little Scratch reflects Ms. Watson’s experience. It’s real enough as read from the page.
“Me” suffers the all-too-familiar aggressions that routinely ambush any young woman. A man in a car slows down beside her as she bicycles to work and, not getting the reaction he wants (whatever that may be), hurls an obscenity at her. A shopkeeper lays his phone screen-up on the counter with a gross-out video playing on it — on purpose? or is it her fault for being paranoid? Or just for being a woman buying a snack?
But Rebecca Watson didn’t write a book about how lousy life can be for young women, especially this young woman. She wrote a book about a young woman living an ordinary life, while struggling with a trauma that has failed (so far) to impair her capacity for joy. She loves sex, she loves pedaling her bicycle, she loves eating chips and listening to music. She is as self-conscious and vulnerable as any young person. A writer who’s “finding it hard to write at the moment, to keep motivated,” still she persists in verbalizing her experience — to a point.
That point where she pauses — or stalls, or stops altogether — locates the book’s tension. We don’t keep reading to find out what “really” happened with her boss (that’s clear enough) or what she’ll do, or not do, about it. The tension builds in her internal exploration of how the assault has rooted itself in her body and psyche, in how she frames it, and in how it filters her outlook, especially toward women and men.
As a writer, “me” is conscious of confessing to an unknown reader: you, and only you. She won’t reveal the assault to her mother who, in one of those memories that brand you for life, once shamed her for gazing at and delighting in the beautiful freedom of a naked girl-child, a memory that, with a few others, takes a whack at her image of “the little, happy, past me.” She wants to tell her boyfriend, but she hasn’t been able to, yet.
She is well aware of the likely consequences of revealing sexual assault; her investigation into her own situation is rigorous. But her wry introspection keeps us wondering: will she circle her experience without reaching its center, or is she zeroing in on it?
The beauty of Little Scratch lies not only in its fresh prose and innovative form. Rebecca Watson leads us to trust or to doubt — depending on the reader, I suppose — that her narrator will get to where she needs to be. Resisting moralizing as well as the closure of redemption or despair, Ms. Watson leaves this a hard-won place too personal, too individual to be prescribed. She achieves this with a richly articulated point of view. In reading Little Scratch, we become the story’s “I.” It’s up to us what we will do with that.
[Published by Doubleday on August 11, 2020, 224 pages, $23.95 hardcover]