It was originally published in 2015 by Stinging Fly. Stories from The White Review, Stinging Fly, Harper's Magazine and New Yorker. The numbers in brackets are the page counts.
- Voyage in the dark (0.5) - some girls watch a handsome man. The narrator waits in his garden for him to return home.
- Morning, Noon & Night (17) - A UK woman who lives in a cottage has routines to get through the day - chopping food, etc. She got permission from the Catholic church to use a little patch of land to grow vegetables. She was an academic. Asked to talk at a US university she chose to talk about Love and disintegration of selfhood, referencing Sappho and Nick Cave. She met a man there and they visited each other for 18 months, mostly for sex. She got a job at a bike repair shop. She buys 2 tapestries thinking that they're sparse because threads have fallen out. When they're delivered by a man she notices that the other threads never existed, though the canvasses are framed, so they must be finished. The story is peppered with phrases like "in fact", "by the way", etc.
- First thing (0.5) - woken by the ratcatcher who s/he'd summoned, the narrator forgets how s/he takes his/her coffee, and copies the decision of the ratcatcher
- The Big Day (14) - The neighbour's having a little party to show how they've restored cottages, including the narrator's. The narrator's not sure why s/he's visiting before the event that they're not going to. The narrator's angry for half a page - "quite frankly I would be disgusted to the point of taking immediate vengeance if I was brought to a purportedly magical place one afternoon in late September and thereupon belted down to the pond, all my myself most likely, only to discover the word pond scrawled on a poxy piece of damp plywood right there beside it. I'd be hopping". The narrator imagines what to say if they were the guest speaker. They tidy up after the event. Phrases like "due to the fact that", "for the reason that" recur. Emotions are rather detached, e.g. carrying a rusksack the narrator writes "I think I'm right in saying that it felt very consoling" and "I appear to be a very culturally oriented sort of person They write "I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English"
- Wishful Thinking (0.25) - someone wonders if they've had breakfast
- A Little Before Seven (7) - It begins with "I was cleaning out the fire grate first thing and as I dropped the pan vertical so that the ashes released into the bucket below I was distracted by an observation that was general comical yet profoundly concerning: I rarely acquire any enthusiasm for the opposite sex outside of being drunk. It was soon obvious that this particular observation wasn't simply a fleeting instance of light-hearted self-derogation and as it achieved increasing firmness in my mind I felt incredulous and a bit put out that urgent tidings such as these could have remained distant for so long". Two pages later she wonders if this is why she drinks so much. The wordiness is all part of the voice, the persona. That said, you can have too much of a good thing. For instance, the "I rarely acquire ... drunk" sentence could be replaced by "I don't fancy men unless I'm drunk". Doubling the word-count without adding more content is a gamble. In this piece, I don't think it pays off.
- To A God Unknown (1.5) - She's about to have a bath. She opens a window. A leaf blows in. A storm's brewing. She knows it's an old one. She disconnects lamps for safety, has a bath, empathises with the storm, reconnects the power.
- Two Weeks Since (0.5) - 2 horses in fields. 2 observers? A horse gives/gave birth
- Stir-Fry (0.1)
- Finishing Touch (6) - she hosts a party, calculating about how to sit on the ottoman (which contains old bed linen) and hoping certain guests will turn up. The best so far.
- Control Knobs (16) - The 3 detachable knobs on her hob are breaking one by one. She reads a story about a women who becomes the last person alive and has identity problems. Disappointing.
- Postcard (0.5) - Frogs and vaginas
- The Deepest Sea (11) - Perhaps not a story, but it has more overt autobiographical details than the other pieces have. She has different fountain pens for different purposes. She is trying to write this piece in green ("clandestine dealings") but it's coming out in black. The landlady's clearing out - "she came to my door and asked me about two large bags of empty bottles which have nothing to do with me, but of course one has to be very careful about how one communicates that something has nothing to do with one so as not to get the people it has everything to do with into hot water". Amongst the junk are her Ph.D thesis notes and a letter from a man - "And yet it is that, the defeated aspect of desire, hopes dashed and ragged, which in the end outlives any exalted pronouncement striving towards the eternal". It was while he was explaining to her the meaning of "cantilevered" that she'd realised it was over.
- Oh, Tomato Purée! (0.5) - Squeezing the last bits of fresh stuff out past the crusty old stuff
- Morning, 1908 (9) - she goes for a walk, sees cows, a young man, a gate, and has a little epiphany - "I wasn't quite myself; or perhaps, I was myself more than ever"
- The Gloves Are Off (11) - A male friend arrives, to have a shower. She's outside somewhere - "seeing oneself being looked for wrenches the heart oh ever so gently and must be one of my favourite occurences". His shower is broken. She'd talked to his landlord to get it sorted out. While he showering she thinks about the thatchers who from her roof had ogled the girl in the next cottage, speaking to each other in Irish, which she doesn't understand. When her friend returns she gets him to help tidy the garden. She becomes obsessive. He's forgotten. "I believe that's where I lost my heart". Then there's a page of near nonsense - "None flim flim on that here cavorting mainstay ... Oh, the earth, the earth and the women there, inside the simpering huts, stamped and spiritless, blowing on the coals, Not far away, but beyond the way of return"
- Over and Done With (4) - she enjoys burning the holly. She feels more confident about dealing with social events.
- Words Escape Me (4) - it's raining. She opens the top half of the door them doesn't remember why. She writes in the dark. "And then, for the first time that day, just as it was ending, I knew where I was - I was beneath the ground". It ends with "sooner or later, I thought, you're going to have to speak up"
- Lady Of The House (16) - She thinks about what kind of monster is beneath the rowers she saw. Later she writes "Not a metaphor, nothing like that - I'd never want the monster to stand for something, that's for sure". She's returning to her cottage after a night with her lover. She thought of leaving something so he'd be reminded of her during the day. "Side-by-side we're in completely different worlds." Later she texts him about the moon. He's in the cinema at the time. At home she irons his shirts. The landlady warns her that she may need to move out because the cottage is being sold.
- Old Ground (1.5) - Thinking back again to when she was a girl. "She closed the earth over the green papers". Nas this anything to do with the earlier green ink and imagining she was "beneath the ground"?
Men (or at least memories of them) arriving then going (having delivered something or provoked an insight) often feature. At one point the narrator writes "Look here, it's perfectly obvious by now to anyone that my heads is turned by imagined elsewheres and hardly at all by present circumstances". Her focus on objects and detail may be a reaction to this. Just when she seems to be about to address a personal issue often she veers off. The standard symbol of House as Self works quite well - the roles of chimneys, doors and windows.
Other reviews
- Andrew Gallix (Her soliloquies are peppered with asides to an implied reader – “if you want to know” – cheekily drawing attention to the amount of information being withheld. )
- Meghan O’Rourke (The stories shun conventional narrative devices (like plot), instead dramatizing the associative movement of the narrator’s “mind in motion.” ... “Pond” tries to reach insight by way of defamiliarization ... You might be wondering — at times I did — why any of this is any good. Sometimes the writing doesn’t quite coalesce into transporting insight ... Despite its occasional unevenness, “Pond” makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. )
- Diane Stubbings (Our sense of who this woman is and why she has retreated to a remote village on the west coast of Ireland is gleaned through glancing asides. ... Later in the story, we get an intimation of what it is about the pond and its lack of depth that irks her. She tried to lose ‘a broken, precious thing’ in the pond and found the pond not deep enough for the deed ... Time and again, her thoughts return to things that are buried or hidden, to the ways in which the layers of the past are embedded in the present moment. It’s a preoccupation that touches on her own history as well as that of the Irish people. She both yields to these histories and resists them. ... One piece of writing that Pond seems to be all the time pushing against is Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 account ... The influence of Samuel Beckett’s early prose work on Pond is palpable. )
- Linnie Greene (Fractured, voice-driven, and prone to modernistic meanderings, Pond is the sort of avant-garde opus destined to put its author on the map alongside modern-day prose stylists of the highest order.)
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