Writers are sometimes described as being so good that one would gladly read their shopping list. Livia Franchini is kind enough to provide the list.
In the opening pages of her debut, Shelf Life, we meet Ruth Beadle, a 30-year-old care home nurse, whose fiance Neil has unexpectedly left her after 10 years together. His sudden absence – the empty indentation of his body in their bed, the gaps in the wardrobe, the missing laundry basket that, for some reason, he took even though he left his dressing gown behind – leaves her clutching at physical things. It is one of these objects, the shopping list for the forthcoming week, that anchors the novel. Each item on the list becomes a chapter; each chapter provides a window into Ruth’s life, from before Neil and after Neil. I know women like Ruth, have made tea or poured wine for them after their break-ups. But Ruth doesn’t have anyone to pour her wine or make her tea, and over the course of the novel we get an idea of why that is – why a woman who spends all her time and energy taking care of the people around her doesn’t have anyone she trusts to take care of her.
As a structural conceit, the list could easily have been restrictive, but Franchini uses it lightly. Each item permits a jump in time, perspective, even form. “Sugar” takes us 10 years into the past, as Neil watches Ruth from the window of the travel agency where he works, keeping obsessive notes on her comings and goings, waiting for the chance to meet “his girl”. “Pizza” gives us the diary of Alanna, Ruth’s college roommate, written during a two-week trip she and Ruth took to Italy, a holiday Neil arranged for them and which he used to get near to Ruth. “Honey” is made up of the text messages between Ruth and Neil after the trip, before they were a couple, in which he tells her how badly he wants to get to know her. “Dates” comprises the emails Neil sends anonymously to the young woman over whom he has begun to obsess a few months before leaving Ruth. The list draws together the pieces of the novel, adding depth to the narrative and providing a sense of both tidiness and pace.
All this makes Neil sound less suited to a relationship than a restraining order. But even more unsettling than his behaviour is the fact that none of the characters in the novel appears to perceive it as particularly troubling, least of all Neil himself. In his interactions with women he consistently stays just the right side of acceptability, and when he crosses the line he does so with plausible deniability. This is what makes Franchini’s characterisation so brilliant – we all by now recognise the open misogynist, the overt abuser, but the subtle attack, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality of predatory wokeness: that’s slipperier. It’s clear that Neil thinks he’s done nothing wrong, and if you didn’t consider his actions as a whole, you could almost believe him.
The opening scene, in which Ruth washes dishes while Neil tells her about all the love he has inside him and how it doesn’t make sense not to share it with more than one person, made me expect the novel to explore the psyches of two people who weren’t right for each other. But as the evidence piles up, the text messages and emails and remembered conversations, Neil’s behaviour becomes harder for a reader to rationalise, even as his utter self-righteousness, his conviction that the way he moves through the world is beyond reproach, becomes clearer. This kind of entitlement shapes the world, and it is perfectly captured.
Franchini is a poet and a translator, and this can be seen in the attention she pays to the flavour, shape and weight of words. For every moment that I wondered how the plot would be resolved, there were several in which I paused, unwilling to move on from an arresting turn of phrase. Some of these are brief and descriptive: clean laundry “pushes its face against the glass of the washing machine”; Ruth and Neil sleep “pressed against one another like flowers in a book”. Elsewhere the lyricism expands on more abstract ideas: “History happened in the back rooms while we delayed our knitting: making and unmaking, the stuff of witches.”
Altogether, this is a book that should not be missed: a beautifully executed contribution to the discussion of toxic masculine behaviour and the patterns of socialisation that enable it.
• Sara Taylor’s The Lauras is published by Windmill. Shelf Life is published by Doubleday (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
