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Interiors
One day in April the body of Owen Beausoleil, a poet, is found drowned. As the investigation begins, three people find themselves haunted by him – Noah Lang, the medical examiner who performed the autopsy; his wife, Kitty Lang, a psychotherapist; and Lolita Hammershøi, a ballet dancer and Owen’s close friend. As the three of them become bound up in the mystery of what happened to Owen, their lives begin to interweave in both expected, and unexpected ways. Meanwhile, Owen intervenes from the after-life, desperate to find out his fate. Interiors is about how loss and desire shape our lives, and about what waits beyond the borders of everyday life.
- GenresFiction
201 pages, Paperback
Published October 14, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 25, 2022
Alive, Owen had the fantastic energy of youth, blood moving quickly under his skin. It wasn’t real, thought Lang: I have never seen him alive. What was real was the bruising, still inconclusive. Water in the stomach, water in the lungs. That was real. If you drown when you are unconscious your body won’t fight it; all it takes is a single inhalation. So essential to keep the body’s interiors discrete, each organ a little chamber with the door locked.
Interiors by Jessica Widner is published by 87 Press who describe themselves as "South London’s radical publishing collective” and, when crowdfunding their production for 2022 including this book stated:
The novel opens with the scene of an autopsy of a man who drowned, but with unexplained head trauma, conducted by a man in his late 30s, Medical Examiner: Dr. Noah Tzara Lang. His mother, who had left him and his father when he was young, had written a doctoral thesis on Dadaism, and had chosen his middle name.
But something is different about this case - Lang finds himself strangely entranced by the corpse:
He had been a medical examiner for a long time but he had never seen a body that looked quite like this before. He stood still over it with his scalpel in hand, contemplating. It looked, at first glance, like a statue; a beautiful object.
...
Lang was a man of science. But, in that first incision, a fleeting feeling arose; complex, multifaceted, yet fleeting nonetheless. All the compartments of his life began to collapse into one another; his own flesh opening beneath his instrument, his insides mixing with the air around him.
...
He did have a strategy to keep focused; the thing that worked best, that he had come to enjoy the most, was imagining himself as a kind of psychopomp, easing dead souls from one world to the next. A grandiose fantasy, maybe, but he did not otherwise suffer from grandiosity (delusions or otherwise). In this fantasy, his examination room became a dark, hushed space between life and death, and only he was able to negotiate the passage, to slip between the two places. He is not authoritarian, but comforting. Not a doctor, but a guide. Kind, composed, patient. Deep down, the Doctor wasn’t such a man of science. But to just look at him, you would not see the playfulness, the child he never really got to be, so hidden that even he could not see it.
(nice link to Treacle Walker in the last paragraph)
But he was equally struck by Lola who came to identify the body, a leading ballerina. Owen was a close friend of her husband, Thomas, and, she discovers when she walks in on them one day, his long-term occassional lover, but when Thomas and Lola separate she has no contact with Thomas but forms a strong friendship with Owen.
As Lang works, he enters in to a kind of imagined dialogue with the deceased, but when Owen appears to him in his dreams, he increasingly realises this voice seems to be exterior. Telling his partner of 15 years, Kitty, a therapist, that he is meeting on an old friend, he instead makes contact with Lola, and finds that she is also having similar dreams:
He had made his choice. He was already slipping away from the version of reality that his wife lived in – the reality where he had gone to meet an old school friend for lunch – and the one he lived in, where a dead man was somehow still alive, and where his life had now become tied up in this woman he barely knew, who looked at him with an expression of such naked need, who he could already see had one foot in this world and one in the dream-world, and who would stay there with Owen, if she could.
When he confesses to Kitty she initially accuses him (not unreasonably) of using his imagined fantasies about the dead Owen to justify his real fantasy for Lola, a lithe ballerina, but then Kitty also encounters Owen in her dreams.
Meanwhile in another narrative strand Owen finds himself in a Kafkesque form of afterlife limbo (one of which Owen himself observes I don’t understand ... this place seems inconsistent), from where he reaches out to those left behind: Lola, The Doctor (as he thinks of Lang) and eventually Kitty, seeking in them all 'a reader' who can help him make sense of his life.
And the whole story reaches a transcendent climax in a ruined abbey on the West Coast of Island (I think Derrynane Abbey) which is very special to Owen and to which he summons the others.
Haunting and memorable - 3.5 stars rounded to 4.
Interiors by Jessica Widner is published by 87 Press who describe themselves as "South London’s radical publishing collective” and, when crowdfunding their production for 2022 including this book stated:
Over the last four years, the87press’ bold and daring challenge to the failure of diversity and inclusion initiatives has been well received by a growing international grassroots readership. the87press focuses attention across spectrums of underrepresentation, featuring regular work from racialised, LGBTQ+, Neurodiverse, and working class writers across genres, forms, and contexts. This event marks the beginning of the fifth year of operations, against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile climate for the arts and humanities.
The novel opens with the scene of an autopsy of a man who drowned, but with unexplained head trauma, conducted by a man in his late 30s, Medical Examiner: Dr. Noah Tzara Lang. His mother, who had left him and his father when he was young, had written a doctoral thesis on Dadaism, and had chosen his middle name.
But something is different about this case - Lang finds himself strangely entranced by the corpse:
He had been a medical examiner for a long time but he had never seen a body that looked quite like this before. He stood still over it with his scalpel in hand, contemplating. It looked, at first glance, like a statue; a beautiful object.
...
Lang was a man of science. But, in that first incision, a fleeting feeling arose; complex, multifaceted, yet fleeting nonetheless. All the compartments of his life began to collapse into one another; his own flesh opening beneath his instrument, his insides mixing with the air around him.
...
He did have a strategy to keep focused; the thing that worked best, that he had come to enjoy the most, was imagining himself as a kind of psychopomp, easing dead souls from one world to the next. A grandiose fantasy, maybe, but he did not otherwise suffer from grandiosity (delusions or otherwise). In this fantasy, his examination room became a dark, hushed space between life and death, and only he was able to negotiate the passage, to slip between the two places. He is not authoritarian, but comforting. Not a doctor, but a guide. Kind, composed, patient. Deep down, the Doctor wasn’t such a man of science. But to just look at him, you would not see the playfulness, the child he never really got to be, so hidden that even he could not see it.
(nice link to Treacle Walker in the last paragraph)
But he was equally struck by Lola who came to identify the body, a leading ballerina. Owen was a close friend of her husband, Thomas, and, she discovers when she walks in on them one day, his long-term occassional lover, but when Thomas and Lola separate she has no contact with Thomas but forms a strong friendship with Owen.
As Lang works, he enters in to a kind of imagined dialogue with the deceased, but when Owen appears to him in his dreams, he increasingly realises this voice seems to be exterior. Telling his partner of 15 years, Kitty, a therapist, that he is meeting on an old friend, he instead makes contact with Lola, and finds that she is also having similar dreams:
He had made his choice. He was already slipping away from the version of reality that his wife lived in – the reality where he had gone to meet an old school friend for lunch – and the one he lived in, where a dead man was somehow still alive, and where his life had now become tied up in this woman he barely knew, who looked at him with an expression of such naked need, who he could already see had one foot in this world and one in the dream-world, and who would stay there with Owen, if she could.
When he confesses to Kitty she initially accuses him (not unreasonably) of using his imagined fantasies about the dead Owen to justify his real fantasy for Lola, a lithe ballerina, but then Kitty also encounters Owen in her dreams.
Meanwhile in another narrative strand Owen finds himself in a Kafkesque form of afterlife limbo (one of which Owen himself observes I don’t understand ... this place seems inconsistent), from where he reaches out to those left behind: Lola, The Doctor (as he thinks of Lang) and eventually Kitty, seeking in them all 'a reader' who can help him make sense of his life.
And the whole story reaches a transcendent climax in a ruined abbey on the West Coast of Island (I think Derrynane Abbey) which is very special to Owen and to which he summons the others.
Haunting and memorable - 3.5 stars rounded to 4.
February 18, 2023
Interiors is a novel with a captivating mystery at its heart: the body of Owen Beausoleil, a poet, is found drowned. Widner skilfully balances a polyvocal narrative, inviting readers into the perspectives of three fascinating characters as their lives are altered by Owen’s death in different ways. Seamlessly, Widner attends to a lyrical style while building suspense and intrigue. It is an enthralling book, and one of my favourite reads of 2022.
October 21, 2022
4.5 stars rounded up
Owen's afterlife struggle might be an alternate title. The GR blurb ends with this sentence: "Interiors is about how loss and desire shape our lives, and about what waits beyond the borders of everyday life." I agree 100% that it is about what waits beyond the borders of everyday life but still considering whether the first half of the sentence is accurate, as I think it's bigger than that.
Owen is undergoing an autopsy as the book opens. He drowned but the question is whether the injury to his head was caused prior to his arrival in the water and whether that injury actually caused his death. The autopsy is done by Noah, who is married to Kitty. Lola comes to see the body shortly post-autopsy. Noah is really struck by Lola and her sadness for her friend Owen.
Lola was married to Thomas, who was, we are told, Owen's best friend. Lola and Owen became great friends and remained so even after the divorce. Owen moved away just after the divorce but had recently returned. Lola is devastated by Owen's death.
Owen begins to visit Noah and Lola in their dreams. This brings Lola and Noah together. Noah eventually tells Kitty he has been seeing Lola to discuss the dreams (the truth at the time he tells her) but Kitty accuses him of more and indeed more does occur, although not at that time. But then Owen visits Kitty in her dreams. Owen wants them to help him understand.
Thomas is the last person to see Owen alive. He is questioned by the police but let go.
This is a creepy book and one that drew me in. I'm still unsure about the ending, where Owen has drawn Lola, Noah, and Kitty to the ruins of a monastery on the Kerry coast. The book is not long (201 pages) and reads quickly with a good bit of tension.
Owen's afterlife struggle might be an alternate title. The GR blurb ends with this sentence: "Interiors is about how loss and desire shape our lives, and about what waits beyond the borders of everyday life." I agree 100% that it is about what waits beyond the borders of everyday life but still considering whether the first half of the sentence is accurate, as I think it's bigger than that.
Owen is undergoing an autopsy as the book opens. He drowned but the question is whether the injury to his head was caused prior to his arrival in the water and whether that injury actually caused his death. The autopsy is done by Noah, who is married to Kitty. Lola comes to see the body shortly post-autopsy. Noah is really struck by Lola and her sadness for her friend Owen.
Lola was married to Thomas, who was, we are told, Owen's best friend. Lola and Owen became great friends and remained so even after the divorce. Owen moved away just after the divorce but had recently returned. Lola is devastated by Owen's death.
Owen begins to visit Noah and Lola in their dreams. This brings Lola and Noah together. Noah eventually tells Kitty he has been seeing Lola to discuss the dreams (the truth at the time he tells her) but Kitty accuses him of more and indeed more does occur, although not at that time. But then Owen visits Kitty in her dreams. Owen wants them to help him understand.
Thomas is the last person to see Owen alive. He is questioned by the police but let go.
This is a creepy book and one that drew me in. I'm still unsure about the ending, where Owen has drawn Lola, Noah, and Kitty to the ruins of a monastery on the Kerry coast. The book is not long (201 pages) and reads quickly with a good bit of tension.
November 14, 2022
Lang was a man of science. But, in that first incision, a fleeting feeling arose; complex, multifaceted, yet fleeting nonetheless. All the compartments of his life began to collapse into one another; his own flesh opening beneath his instrument, his insides mixing with the air around him. A word he hated: contamination. Exposure. He nearly pulled the scalpel away, but the thing passed – he relaxed. He’d had a coffee later than normal, he was just jittery. This body is very well preserved, remarkably so, but that is no cause for alarm. These things happen. He shook his head side to side a little, and as he returned steadily to the performance of tasks that had long ago become habitual – the slicing, the peeling back, the extracting, the measuring, the stitching back together – his mind began to wander, the film of memory beginning to play
This book is published by 87 Press, “South London’s radical publishing collective” and is the debut novel of the writer and academic Jessica Widner, currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh working on a thesis that explores reading as an embodied, sensual process in contemporary women’s fiction.
The book, which moves between a series of appropriately interior first party perspectives, opens with a medical examiner - Noah Lang - performing an autopsy on the body of a young man whose death by drowning under a bridge is possibly a suicide (due to the heavy alcohol in his bloodstream) and possibly more suspicious (due to some head trauma).
Lang who professionally is always outwardly extremely composed (including to those who know him best such as his yoga-loving and secretly-Medium-visiting Therapist wife Kitty) has always secretly thought of himself as something of a psychopomp guiding the dead to the next life, but has also always successfully managed to largely insulate himself from any lingering impact of his autopsies.
Here however he finds himself both drawn to the dead body and also haunted by the memory of Lola(Lolita) a leading ballerina who came to identify the body as that of her closest friend – Owen (a poet). Owen we quickly realise when we switch (via Kitty) to Lola’s interior, was a lifelong friend (and she comes to realise occasional lover) of Lola’s now estranged husband Thomas – having left some time back he returned more recently (after Lola and Thomas split) and formed a deep friendship with Lola.
Our next shift takes us into the mind of Owen – post death and now in some form of limbo/purgatory/bardo (note that the book is very specifically non-categorical about religion and the idea of quantum immortality via parallel existences is also discussed in the novel). Owen is faced (in a scene reminiscent of the beginning and end of the 2022 Booker winner “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”) with the choices to go back, stay in the limbo (but face the dissolution of his existence) or go forward into the unknown.
Returning to Lang (known in most cases as “The Doctor” to the other characters – which I have to say is one of the rare missteps in the novel as it can make the book read a little too like a Dr Who script) he finds himself in a series of very vivid and real dreams where he meets with and talks with Owen – who seems to be looking for a “reader” who can help him make sense of his life, death and future.
And when Lang reaches out to Lola (the two both deeply impacted by their earlier encounter at the identification) he finds that she too is being visited by Owen, and later the initially sceptical Kitty (first assuming Lang’s claims are cover for an affair he intends to embark on with a very attractive ballerina) finds herself drawn in as well.
At the book’s climax Owen draws all three of them to visit his now seemingly corporeal self at a ruined abbey on an Irish island (Derrynane Abbey) – with the climax not perhaps fully living up to the earlier promise of what is a memorable and literally haunting novel which serves as a fascinating examination of both the inner life and what lives on after death.
That thing she was telling me the other day, what was it, something about redistributing matter – the redistribution of matter – yes, you know I couldn’t stop thinking about it after she said it! But then I started to feel worried, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that are not matter – the immeasurable things, and I started to think about what is lost, other than matter, which as you know, breaks down, becomes other. But what about that which was not matter to begin with, you know, the inner life, all of that. All of that too becomes lost. And I couldn’t stop thinking that no, surely it isn’t lost, it can’t just be obliterated like that. A whole life – the dreams we don’t remember, the fantasies that unspool in our heads before we fall asleep. The thoughts we have that are too terrible to name. The memories, memories of things that happened when we were the only ones there to witness them. Things that leave no record. The invisible things that expand within the self. They cannot disappear, that can’t simply vanish. Tell me, Doctor, where do they go? I am not religious, I will not say the soul. But the inner life, that suffuses the whole body. The limbs, the organs… all the desire that animates the flesh and voice. Oh, I am very worried about it
November 11, 2022
‘Interiors’ was a gift from a good friend (thanks Marian!) and I freely admit my usual book choices tend to be less intelligent, escapist fare.
This is a deeply layered story with richly developed characters as frail, torn and flawed as any of us. Widner is a gifted writer; highly articulate with beautiful Ondaatge-like turns of phrase and telling imagery throughout. For example, the maxim that ‘touch begins before contact’ and the dangerous nature of fantasy; the ‘inner life’ physically reflected in Noah’s occupation as a medical examiner and mentally reflected in Kitty’s occupation as a therapist; in the reference to missing Owen as one would a ‘phantom limb’.
At the risk of a too-obvious descriptor, this is a haunting story - one you will be thinking about long after you have finished it.
This is a deeply layered story with richly developed characters as frail, torn and flawed as any of us. Widner is a gifted writer; highly articulate with beautiful Ondaatge-like turns of phrase and telling imagery throughout. For example, the maxim that ‘touch begins before contact’ and the dangerous nature of fantasy; the ‘inner life’ physically reflected in Noah’s occupation as a medical examiner and mentally reflected in Kitty’s occupation as a therapist; in the reference to missing Owen as one would a ‘phantom limb’.
At the risk of a too-obvious descriptor, this is a haunting story - one you will be thinking about long after you have finished it.
March 19, 2023
Jessica Widner weaves a narrative unlike anything I’ve read before. She draws the reader into the lives of all the characters with masterful subtlety; you’re caught before you know it! The ideas and events linger in your mind as you pause in between chapters – if you can even put the book down. Readers will resonate with the book at so many levels, but you won’t even realize it until the mysterious story unfolds. I don’t want to spoil it for the reader, but the book is formatted (not just pacing) in such a way so as to give the reader time to absorb enough information, reflect on it, and then move on. Pick up the book; you’ll see what I mean. Great read!!!
December 29, 2022
Noah Lang is pathologist, a profession he would not be able exercise if he wasn’t a calm and unperturbed fellow. His wife Kitty, a psychologist, deals with the workings the mind – while periodically resorting to a psychic reader to untangle her own mind. We meet Lang when the drowned body of Owen, a poet, lands on his surgical table. Right after the autopsy ballet dancer Lola, former wife of one of Owen’s friends, shows up to view the corpse. Noah is struck by her, but the two would probably never meet again if it wasn’t for Owen. The latter haunts their dreams and waking life (along with the reader in alternating chapters) from the afterlife as he tries to grasp the essence of the inner life and the mystery of what he has become after death. Right after passing he was given some choices, and now he cannot remember what his pick was.
At one level I found Interiors an intriguing, propulsive read steeped in mystery and rarefied atmospheres, in which we keep wondering how Owen died, what is happening to him and what will happen to the people he is haunting as he enters their minds and manipulates their desire. Indeed, the novel is an investigation of the nature of desire and the way it arises and materialises, be it out of words or the power of imagination.
At another level, Interiors is an interesting speculative novel that ironically plays with ontological/philosophical questions such as the essence of the inner life and the nature of experience. It is an arduous enough task to discuss what happens after death, but the author takes the wise, smart approach of using disparate philosophical ideas revolving about the notion of what we can know, spanning from Aristotle to quantum immortality to the redistribution of matter. Does this approach make the book boring? Not at all, as the ideas are playfully tested and set in motion in the experience of the characters. The author makes very clear that everything is fictional and pervaded by irony, which lends credibility to an otherwise absurd narrative.
All in all a quirky, inventive piece of literary fiction I thoroughly enjoyed. As a bonus, I found out that I live not too far from “purgatory”, a liminal space which interestingly materialises as Derrynane beach/Abbey in Caherdaniel, co. Kerry, Ireland (the same area where A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa takes place)! Recommended.
At one level I found Interiors an intriguing, propulsive read steeped in mystery and rarefied atmospheres, in which we keep wondering how Owen died, what is happening to him and what will happen to the people he is haunting as he enters their minds and manipulates their desire. Indeed, the novel is an investigation of the nature of desire and the way it arises and materialises, be it out of words or the power of imagination.
At another level, Interiors is an interesting speculative novel that ironically plays with ontological/philosophical questions such as the essence of the inner life and the nature of experience. It is an arduous enough task to discuss what happens after death, but the author takes the wise, smart approach of using disparate philosophical ideas revolving about the notion of what we can know, spanning from Aristotle to quantum immortality to the redistribution of matter. Does this approach make the book boring? Not at all, as the ideas are playfully tested and set in motion in the experience of the characters. The author makes very clear that everything is fictional and pervaded by irony, which lends credibility to an otherwise absurd narrative.
All in all a quirky, inventive piece of literary fiction I thoroughly enjoyed. As a bonus, I found out that I live not too far from “purgatory”, a liminal space which interestingly materialises as Derrynane beach/Abbey in Caherdaniel, co. Kerry, Ireland (the same area where A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ni Ghriofa takes place)! Recommended.
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