Halfway through Rebecca Watson’s second novel – which is delivered as an unfiltered internal monologue similar to her experimental debut little scratch – Rosa, the twenty-something narrator, is nursing a pint. She inwardly asks: “How do I deal with the lingering traces of my brother / a brother I never fully understood / a brother who will not leave me the f**k alone?”
I Will Crash is set over the course of five consecutive days. On the first of these, Rosa, a teaching assistant and writer, discovers that her estranged brother has been killed in a car accident. Grief here is especially murky: weeks before Rosa is told this news, her brother – whose name is never revealed – turned up unannounced on her doorstep, after an absence of six years. Before he explained the reason for the visit, Rosa turned him away.
This inciting incident – the closing of a door – opens out into a deeply discomfiting narrative. Rosa reflects that “a death brings everything alive” and while the novel is rooted in the present, rich in well-observed domestic banality, embittered memories of growing up with her brother are vividly resuscitated.
Rosa recalls occasions when, as teenagers, her brother psychologically and physically abused her. She confronts his implication in other tragedies concerning her schoolfriend, Alice, too. Despite seeking their help, Rosa’s divorced parents wrote off this disturbing behaviour – sinister threats, visceral pranks, pernicious belittling and more – as run of the mill sibling rivalry. They existed in an iron-clad state of denial.
As was the case with Watson’s acclaimed debut, attention to the gendered nature of the violence Rosa suffers at the hands of her brother and other men is marked. Likewise, it is just as formally inventive. Here, no two pages of text look alike: paragraph indentations are unpredictable, indicating a shift in mood, time or a move towards more hypothetical thinking.
Sentences are bisected by huge gaps. Sometimes words zig zag down the middle of a page. Conventions of punctuation are suspended. As Rosa struggles to make sense of her possible complicity in her brother’s mistreatment of her, and of her sense of herself as a victim, the text’s molten aesthetic dramatises how problematic the whole enterprise of communication and understanding really is.
This novel is also obsessed with the impossibility – or at least the fragility – of wholeness: whole selves, whole truths, whole families, and whole memories seem entirely out of Rosa’s reach. As such, as Yeats would have it, “the centre cannot hold” – and the form can only splinter.
But the text is far from indecipherable. Rosa’s confessional introspections are immediate and arresting. Meaning is often so clear it makes us feel claustrophobic, hemmed in by inescapable intensity.
The novel’s idiosyncrasies also underline the text’s standout quality: its raw ambivalence. Rosa’s thinking turns in on itself endlessly, and is – given her context and history – convincingly jagged and partial. In fact, when towards the end it appears as if the text is tumbling towards a neatly redemptive sign off, a straightforward indication of the healing to come, my heart began to sink.
Largely though, Watson’s examination of familial dysfunction and trauma, and the attempt to rebuild and sustain life in the presence of loss, stylishly avoids pat pronouncements. At its best, the writing suggests that Rosa’s repeated tackling of the question “What was my brother?” is a means for her to finally confront hitherto unexplored aspects of herself.
I Will Crash by Rebecca Watson is published by Faber, £14.99