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Slip of a Fish by Amy Arnold

Nice to have one book I haven’t read. Already won the Northern Book Prize so this has form, but it was also the one we failed to add to our predictions.

I got this some time ago as part of my subscription and thought it was excellent. I plan to re-read it now.

The subs have done well recently - although I thought about resubscribing recently and wasn't so taken by what was coming up.

Like Neil I got this as a subscriber and enjoyed it just under a year ago when I read it.

My review

/review/show...

Some excerpts from my review which I think show why it was chosen for the Goldsmith

"We are used in literature now to the autistic/Asperger’s type character �� taking refuge in numbers and patterns and collections; unable to identify with or understand the emotions and feelings of those around them �� but this is a new voice.

Ash although having a fascination with numbers (for example asking something twice because two is the first prime) finds her internal refuge in language �� loving to consider the sounds of words, playing with homonyms. Words can, if they possess sufficient merit, be added to her word collection ............

.............. And while I have said that she examines past incidents �� her approach increasingly becomes one of avoidance �� shying clear of a full examination of the incidents, leading an ambiguity not just in our own understanding of what occurred but in a reluctance on her own behalf to confront reality. And this avoidance and incompleteness is echoed in the text as ideas, then paragraphs and eventually sentences are left incomplete .........

........... an ambitious novel and a very promising debut: one that brings what I think is a different voice to literature, while dealing sensitively and empathetically with difficult topics of generational abuse and trauma, and one which inventively disassembles language to capture its very themes and ideas"

Gumble's Yard wrote: "Like Neil I got this as a subscriber and enjoyed it just under a year ago when I read it.

My review

/review/show...

Some excerpts from my review which I think sh..."

If only you had mentioned this on the speculation thread then we could have gone 6 for 6 on the shortlist!

Nice to see your and Neil’s name in the back though as subscribers who made the book possible.

This won the inaugural Northern Book Prize in 2018.

“An annual prize awarded to an unpublished book-length work of ambitious literary fiction either written by a writer living in the north of England or by a writer who has a strong connection to the north.

It was set up by publisher And Other Stories when it relocated its main office to Sheffield as part of its commitment to the north and northern writers.

Each year, the winner of the Northern Book Prize receives a prize and advance �� currently worth £5,000 �� creative editorial support from And Other Stories, a contract for the book’s worldwide publication, distribution and representation from And Other Stories��.

The Northern Book Prize 2018 judges commented: ‘A fearless test of empathy, a tender sounding of a mind long since overgrown, and a disturbingly sensual work with a prose that skitters, sinks, hooks, pulls, resists, and flips high in gorgeous blinding flashes, Slip of a Fish heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in English fiction.��

Which made me wonder what won in 2019 and whether we should be earmarking that for the 2020 Goldsmiths. Actually they decided that none of the entries merited the prize (which I must admit I don’t like - must be galling when you miss out on a prize to another book, but surely even worse to miss out and be told none of the books measured up). I guess though with committing to publishing the winner, and with tight budgets, you do have to set standards.

Another book I'm delighted to see on the shortlist as it deserves its place

Great to have your reviews Jackie especially as you were a very early champion of this book and Good Day?

Having just finished Jon Fosse's latest The Other Name: Septology I-II immediately before reading this, the opening, particularly the Nordic references, and the use of light and water, felt very familiar, and then 22 pages in the narrator starts reading an unnamed novel, which is Aliss at the Fire.

I’m not reading reviews yet, I’m only half through the book and wanted to comment that I was passionately hoping Nelson doesn’t get hurt; he hasn’t, but that is small comfort after what I just read. I was not expecting that.

I'm in the minority with this book. I can see its merits, but I thought 2018 was the year of mentally ill mothers. I'm not keen on another mentally ill mum who is an unreliable narrator with a husband who seems to ignore the danger to his child. How did Abbott fall in love with and decide to have a child with a Ash when her childish thinking and speaking makes her mental condition so obvious?
Is writing a character who thinks and talks like a 3 yr old linguistically dextrous? It must be since I am alone in my opinion. I will finish it because I know it's me and not the book that is at fault with my annoyance with Ash.

I'm not sure I'd agree she talks and thinks like a 3yo - not sure I know too many of those who read Jon Fosse for example, and the opening as I mentioned very much channeled his writing.

Postscript: Gumble did review one Jon Fosse novel and say it felt like something a 7 year old might write so perhaps I've just proven your point!

That was a different Fosse story to the ones Ash reads. This was the clear stand out book on the shortlist for me

She does not talk and think like a 3 year old and I should know by now not to post about a book until I’ve read the whole thing and especially if I’m tired and crabby. Ash is mentally ill, hence Abbott ending sentences with “since.��

I can’t say that this is likely to be in my top ten and I don’t want to read another mentally ill mother novel for awhile, but my comments weren’t well thought out and I do see why it won awards.

I finished it. I can’t argue about the writing, it is an exceptional book, but it was an uncomfortable read for me. The language at times felt discordant, hesitating and repetitive, other times it flowed. With almost every book I read I get the rhythm of the prose within the first or second page, with this book I felt like I was off beat most of the time. That is not a criticism, I think that is how people with some forms of mental illness experience the world, perhaps that is why Ash was obsessed with words, collecting them, playing with him, and with time. That aspect of the book was very good.

I am not sure I am comfortable with how Amy Arnold (view spoiler)[handled Ash’s ongoing sexual abuse of Charlie. (hide spoiler)] I trust that Amy Arnold wasn’t implying that Ash’s affair with Kate had anything to do with it, but since there was no indication that Ash’s father was abusive that leaves mental illness or her lesbian affair and questions about her gender as having played a part. I haven’t sat with the book enough yet to really sort out my thoughts on this, but that is my initial reaction. It’s not a small part of the story and Ash says at one point that Charley used to “go on,�� but doesn’t anymore. I believe that had that not been happening Charlie (view spoiler)[wouldn’t have gone like a lamb to the slaughter in the end, she would have fought back. (hide spoiler)] so that issue needs to be handled with great caution.

No one has really addressed it yet here. Do you feel Arnold succeeded in not blurring the lines between mental illness, ambiguous gender, sexual identity and (view spoiler)[incestuous pedophila (hide spoiler)], implying that one of the former was responsible for the latter?

But as you are saying there are a lot of recent novels out there about mentally-ill mothers (and there are also a fair few about lesbians and people questioning their gender), that suggests they (especially the mothers and the lesbians) are represented enough these days in literary fiction that one depiction in a small-press novel doesn't imply that everything Ash does is typical of a person with these traits. (Though some may point out that it is still relatively early days with the gender identity stuff.) What if she had instead been having an affair with a man and it still ended that way for the child? The matter of the child presumably getting less attention, or being dragged along when meeting the affair-partner, would surely have been the same.

I wonder if there are any parallels between the prose style and the poetry of Anne Sexton, given how she is known for treating her daughter.

About 10 years ago, I read a psychology textbook on severe attachment problems in which a couple of chapters had several case studies of women who did what it sounds as if Ash did at the end of this novel. (The book, Raising Parents: Attachment, Parenting and Child Safety by Patricia McKinsey Crittenden, did have a few obvious problems; they did not relate directly to this area, although I suppose some might see them as indicating general problems with the author's approach.) Anyway, since then I've always compared any later news stories about such cases to what was in that book and noticed where there were and were not parallels and where the author's theory does and doesn't fit, so I've read about quite a few. It would seem safe to say that whilst most mothers who have major mental illness or severe psychological issues don't do what Ash did at the end, those who do this either had at the time (e.g. PND from which they recover) or on a more long-term basis, major mental illness or severe psychological issues.

I think the ambiguity as to what happened and why is key to the novel.

On “what�� interesting that you refer on “ongoing abuse��, whereas I read it as a one-off sudden transgression to which she kept mentally returning. And I took the end as a dream rather than real (it is all rather unreal eg security obsessed Abbott really doesn’t notice someone fumbling with the lock?).

On “why�� while I also felt the father wasn’t abusive, most reviews seems to read it as the opposite. And the author herself says she actually doesn’t know if Ash was abused as a child or why she did what she did - this in response to an interview who assumed in their question that Ash was abused herself:

Ash came to me as a very strong narrative voice. In fact, writing Slip of a Fish was sometimes like taking dictation. I tried to be absolutely faithful to Ash �� her story and her view of reality �� and that meant writing with very little understanding of her past. I honestly don’t know if she was a victim first. Perhaps it isn’t important. Perhaps she didn’t want to think about it. I was aware that leaving gaps in her history would invite interpretation. We all like to guess why our friend, father, sister, neighbour behaves in one way or another, but we can never truly know when one behaviour acts as catalyst for another. It felt important to get the last words of the book down and still have uncertainty hanging in the air. What if we never really know why things like this happen?

I agree with Paul - I too read it as a one-off with Charlie. I think that Ash got a little mixed up between Kate and Charlie in that one instance due to her illness, not due to anything else.

I am not sure whether the end was a dream - it certainly has dreamlike qualities. I can't imagine a seven year old going quietly into the night in pajamas and barefoot.

Btw WndyJW, you don't need to use spoilers. We have a general attitude that if you wade into a thread about a particular book you can expect spoilers.

I didn’t think I needed to use spoilers, but I thought I had seen them before so erred on being cautious.

I got the impression that Ash was sexually abusing Charlie, the incident after Ash swam out too far was the first time and then she started creeping into Charlie’s room, making sure Nelson was sleeping and getting into bed with Charlie. Charlie was a good swimmer and spoke up to Ash when we first met Charlie, later in the book Ash tells us that Charlie doesn’t talk as much. And an abused child would go out into the cold night barefoot with no pajamas, and as we saw in a tragic news story in the US of a father that murdered his whole family, his daughters didn’t know to fight back and sat quietly while he strangled one after the other. Abused and traumatized children don’t fight, they go slack and leave their body.

Ash’s obsessive, repetitive thoughts of sex with Kate and repetitive thoughts of her molestation of Charlie, while only alluding to having sex with Abbott one time that I recall, she says after she gets him to go to their ash tree instead of the doctor that he touched her that night, is what made me worry that it appeared as if the lesbian affair caused Ash to abuse her daughter, but after thinking about it I think Arnold knows better and trusts the reader to know better.
As Anto said there are enough representations of mentally ill parents and gay parents that it doesn’t imply a link between either of mental illness or homosexuality and pedophilia.

Amy Arnold packed a lot into a 200 pages!

I think it could be an issue if it were gay male parents as that is a prejudice they sometimes still have to fight (as an old friend found), but not with lesbians. Sexual abuse by mothers is something that's always been discussed very little in media or fiction.

You've got me to see that it may not have been a one-off, WndyJW. I wonder what the "since" is that Abbott refers to then. Presumably he is not aware of any abuse, so what time is he referring to?

I assumed the 'since' was a (further) mental breakdown on her behalf - her language and grasp on reality certainly slips after the incident in the water.

I thought the ‘since�� was since a traumatic childbirth, Ash recalls how painful it was to walk after having Charlie.

It’s not true that only gay men face the accusation of pedophilia. Sexual abuse by women isn’t talked about much in general, but lesbians absolutely do have to deal with that unfounded prejudice as well as gay men.