Since the Accident

by Jen Craig

In a suburban Sydney pub, a woman tells her younger sister the story of how her life has changed since a serious car accident. She speaks of the blossoming of romance, the rediscovery of her long dormant her ability to draw. And yet an exhibition comes to nothing, a lover is abandoned. She leaves everything behind. In the driving monologue of her own narrative, the younger sister attempts to make sense of her life and the events and thoughts that have obsessed the elder since the accident.

Genres: Fiction, Australia

176 pages, Paperback

Published March 8, 2023

About the author

Jen Craig is the author of the novels Since the Accident and Panthers and the Museum of Fire, which was longlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize in Australia and is now published by Zerogram Press in the USA (2020). Her short stories have appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Pacific, and her libretto for Michael Schneider’s chamber opera A Dictionary of Maladies was performed in Lenzburg, Switzerland. Jen holds a doctorate on transgenerational trauma, anorexia and the gothic from Western Sydney University, and is currently living on Darug and Gundungurra lands.

(Source: https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/write...)

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Going to Singapore for a supposed extended visit to her brother was a perfect excuse, she said, because it had enabled a certain amount of her things to be removed from the house. The rest would have to be given up, but it was the only way to move forward. She wanted no dialogue about it with the actuary. For the first time in her life, she said, she was going to be true to her heart. 

William's story finished there, which made everyone curious. Did the sister ever find the high school boy, and hadn't her dream actually indicated something different: that she should pursue the boy surreptitiously and yet stay with the actuary-come-South American as her sister had advised?

After the Accident was the debut novel by Jen Craig, author of the quite brilliant Panthers and the Museum of Fire, recently republished in the US by Zerogram Press.  

After the Accident is now out of print and very hard to obtain so many thanks to the literary agent Martin Shaw (@thebooksdesk) for sending me a spare copy.  

The passage above, towards the end of the novel and which I singled out simply as I am an actuary, is a story being told by the sister of a man named William, whose brother owns a pub in rural Australia.  But, in Bernhardian fashion, this story is relayed to us through layers of narrated speech.   The novel opens:

I had already been back in Australia for some weeks but it wasn't until the second of May that I got around to visiting my sister Trude to see how she had been since the accident. I was the only one in the family she would listen to, as our mother kept telling me, and so it was important that I put in the effort if I didn't want to be responsible for losing her.

We the reader, and the narrator’s friend from France to whom her monologue appears at times to be addressed, are hearing the story from a Australian woman, the youngest in a very large family of sister.  She in turn heard the story from her sister Trude, who relays how the story was told to her, and some fellow students at an art retreat, by William.  So it is very much ‘said his sister, said William, said Trude, [said the narrator]” as a Bernhard novel would have it.  

The narrator had been living out of Australia in Paris for a decade, but has returned, largely at the urging of her manipulative mother, who wants her to contact Trude.  

Trude, older than the narrator but still one of the younger sisters in the family, had some months earlier suffered a serious car crash, the accident of the novel’s title.  Since the accident she ended up in an almost accidental relationship with Murray, the first passer-by on the scene, who kept her awake while the ambulances arrived and stayed with her in hospital until, and even after, her family arrived.  Trude’s relationship with Murray was encouraged, perhaps even created, by her mother. 

But recently Trude, still suffering from the physical after-effects of the accident, has moved out of Murray’s flat and in to a bedsit in a suburban pub, announcing she is following her true calling as an artist, although with little visible output.   Their mother wants the narrator to persuade Trude to move back with Murray (while at the same time, as we discover towards the novel’s end, taking action of her own to facilitate this).

The novel takes place largely in one concentrated act in said pub, the only real action being Trude and her sister moving from the pub itself to Trude’s bedsit upstairs to continue their conversation.  The narrator listens to, and relays to us, Trude’s explanation for her actions, while also reflecting on her own experiences, including her own move to and from Paris, and her relationship with Trude, her other sisters and her mother.  

Trude’s account focuses on a residential art course she had attended, paid for as a surprise gift (and not a terribly welcome one at first) by Murray, at, she soon realises, the instigation of her mother.  And, in particular, it centres on one incident at, or rather immediately after, the art course.  

Travelling back from the course, some of the group (those who hadn’t travelled by their own cars) managed to miss a transport connection and found themselves stranded overnight.  They decide, or rather one strong-willed member Monique decides on their behalf, that they will spend the night in a rural pub, owned by a man called Dave.  While they are negotiating details with Dave’s aforementioned brother William the novel’s crucial incident, crucial in Trude’s mind, as it is ostensibly entirely trivial, occurs, a literal sliding door moment.  

The bottle shop, said Trude, was separated from the rest of the pub by a sliding glass door. At one time, the door must have slid across just the refrigerated section of the bottles, because it had the look, she thought, of doing more than simply separating one section of the pub from the rest of it. Perhaps it was a way to discourage those in the pub from going into the bottle shop and buying their own bottle of something that they could scoff from under the tables. The usual entrance to the bottle shop was from a door in the side of the pub, but they had all entered the pub through the main bar and followed the signs through. Both times they had gone into the bottle shop they had had to slide open the glass door and then slide it back shut because there was a sign on the door that said 'please shut door' in large black letters on a gold piece of card. The first time they had gone into the bottle shop there hadn't been any problems with the door, but the second time, after Monique and then the couple and Sidney had gone through, one of them (it might have been Sidney or Jay) had given the door such a shove that it began to slide closed again of its own accord, effectively threatening to shut Trude out from the bottle shop and the discussion about the accommodation. 
….
She was no longer a child and no longer an adolescent, and yet the door sliding shut fanned a panic in her. She saw it again through the eyes of a filmgoer, and so she could only see it as representing a disaster or at best, an urgent and life-changing choice. The panic overtook her. It was stupid, she said, and it was only a measure of her suggestibility after the workshop that she should have let herself be panicked by a door that was sliding shut. She'd thought until that moment that, unlike the others, she hadn't been affected by all the talk of creativity and images at the workshop, but the door had shown her otherwise. Before the workshop, she thought, the door would just have been a door and not a symbol of an impending disaster or an urgent and life-changing choice. She might have just waited for the door to close in front of her and then, when it closed, simply opened it again straight away and followed the others into the bottle shop where they were organising the accommodation. The door would have been only a door, and even if it had been heavy, somebody might have come and helped her to open it, either one of her colleague from the workshop or somebody from the bar.


This is a wonderfully psychologically intense and yet also witty novel.  I always hesitate to make comparisons but one description might be Rachel Cusk crossed with Gwendoline Riley (although the novel predates their recent work so any possible influence is in the opposite direction), with a Bernhardian grounding, and a strong original flavour of Craig’s own.  

Some quotes from Craig from interviews, mostly at the time of Panthers and the Museum of Fire but also looking back to this novel:

I think I am mostly interested in the telling of a story — in other words, the phenomenon of this mode of passing on of context, images, explanations, humorous twists and shocking facts, both to ourselves and to others — rather than the specific details of the stories or events themselves. For instance, in my first book, Since the Accident, it was not so much the specifics of a car accident that attracted me to write about an accident like that, but all the attempts by the various characters in the story to make sense of its occurrence as something meaningful.
https://belgradeartstudio.com/intervi...

Another important influence has been Thomas Bernhard, who was the first to show me that so much didn’t need to be written at all, that you could cut to the quick – which for me, as for him, I think, are the driving nature of thoughts and the way they play out. I grew up in a household that was presided over by a very dramatic, hyperbolic and vividly expressive if usually contradictory monologist and it took me the work of Thomas Bernhard – first Christina Stead’s, but later Thomas Bernhard’s, to make me aware, very slowly, of what I could do with this dominating part of my experience in terms of form.
https://shortaustralianstories.com.au...

... how to give form to an immensity (as I saw it) in anything less than a massive tome of the length and scope of all those novels that take on big themes, like War and Peace and À la recherche de temps perdu? All of those highly masculine novels that I had neither the desire nor capacity to write. It was only when I decided, and even leaned as strongly as I could into a sort of perverse way of tackling this immensity of image-feeling — that is, it was only when I decided to compress the piece into the shortest and simplest version of what it could ever be — a novel that might have fitted into that first sentence only — that very first sentence and nothing more — it was only then that the work could begin to fill into the shape and length that it became. And so it was necessary for me to do this, to allow it to be the simplest and shortest version of itself. In fact, was deliciously freeing to know that I could do this. Really, I had a strongly not caring attitude about what I was doing because I had already decided that if no one wanted to publish the thing later, when it was finished, I was alright with that — completely alright. The small success — that is, the success on my terms — of my earlier book, Since the Accident, had emboldened me to think in this way. Many years earlier, I had come to understand that I not only did I not naturally write what was readily acceptable as (lyrical) realist (literary) fiction (which, for a long time, I thought I was trying to produce), but I also realized that I did not actually like to read most of that sort of writing, so there was no point at all in pretending that this was what I was wanting to do with my time. There had to be another motivation — a more private motivation. All I wanted, I realized, was to produce a single something in writing that a single reader out there (in my very abstract notion of “out there”) could actually get. That would be enough. And, as there were one or two readers who seemed to get my first book, Since the Accident, I knew that might be possible to do it again.
https://obstructivefictions.substack....

I am not sure I totally “got it” in the way Craig hoped for, but I certainly very much appreciated it.   4.5 stars.    

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

CRITIQUE:

The Narrative Self

This is the second of Jen Craig's novels that I've read, although I believe that it's the first that she wrote.

Like "Panthers", it explores the nature of narrative. It's most likely to interest readers who are interested in the structure of fiction and the perception of reality.

Here, the novel is concerned with how the mind uses narrative to constitute and define the self and identity.

We use our experiences to compose and construct our personality. These experiences relate to moments (some of them titillating, some of them terrible, and some of them traumatic) or what the narrator (Jen?) calls an "accident of events".

Ironically, it's not so much Jen's narrative that we witness, but that of her older sister, Trude, who relates her story to Jen, after Jen returns from a trip to France, away from their mother and family.

Thus, Jen's narrative is her experience of listening to Trude's narrative of how she suffered a near fatal accident (possibly a car accident in which she broke her hip and a leg?), serendipitously met a man who would become her partner (Murray), attended an art workshop in the country, realised her ambition to become an artist, and held her first exhibition.

Meanwhile, in the course of recording Trude's narrative in her journal, Jen, in her turn, at a metafictional level, realises her own ambition of writing a novel.

Jen even describes herself as "an arbitrarily assembled kind of person", she being comprised partly of other people's experiences (and accidents).

The Imperative of Art

Having freed herself (her self?) from the influence of their mother, Trude recognises that she is subject to "the imperative of her art":

"There was always this pursuit, this instinct to move forwards...

"She now knew that she had no other choice than the one of being an artist."

Trude felt that there "was something gripping her about art". It had swept her up on a "wave of opportunity."

The Decisive Break

In retrospect, Trude realises that she needed the accident to achieve her artistic potential:

"There was no other way she was going to be an artist than to have an accident smash a break through the life she had been living...

"She needed to have that accident, then, if being an artist was what she was in the innermost parts of her being, and so paradoxically, for her own survival, she had to have nearly died...

"It had taken the accident, she now realised, to shake something of real sense into her...The art workshop [had] inadvertently changed her life forever...

"There had been a break in her life, a decisive break."

Her creativity now shaped her personality and her relationships with others (including her family). It even shaped her recollection and memory of her childhood and her origins:

"Several times as a child she had become convinced at a particular moment that she had been born to be nothing else but an artist.

"Too soon after each of these occasions, she said, she had let the clutter and disorder of ordinary life intrude on her thoughts."

Jen Craig writes lucidly about the clutter and disorder of ordinary life that define the self and identity.


SOUNDTRACK:

Elvis Costello & The Attractions - "Accidents Will Happen"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU_zM...

[Greg Gerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bitter truths about creativity speckled with dark humor in Jen Craig's wise and witty novel that goes in many unexpected directions. Proustian--all the characters are mirrored in one another. Narrated in an unique screen-like fashion. The wallop at the end is in keeping with what had gone on before. A major book.

[Alistair Ewin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly the only reason this wasn’t 1/5 was the writing style was fucking good but like shite book ngl no disrespect to Jen Craig at all just really not my cup of tea

[Peter Dann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jen Craig sets a lot of hares running in this hilarious shaggy dog tale about a woman who has wanted to "become an artist", and inflicts on her younger sister an account (crammed full of seeming irrelevancies) about how she momentarily achieved just this, if fleetingly.

Craig's real theme here is the psychological difficulty of escaping from a domineering, interfering mother who has set herself up inside one's own head. She captures brilliantly the various linguistic manoeuvres the wanna-be artist and her sister have adopted as they attempt to meet this shared challenge, with varying degrees of success.

It's astonishing to me that such a witty piece of writing has been all but ignored by critics and the reading public alike — but then, Craig is an Australian, I guess, and Australians on the whole do seem to like their novels spread pretty thick with jam.

You can read a more detailed response of mine to this novel here: https://www.peterdannauthor.com/since...