Alex Trnka Reviews:

Bronwyn Fischer, The Adult, Penguin Random House Canada, 2023
Holly Pester, The Lodgers, Assembly Press, 2024

‘I think sometimes you must meet people and be filled with such strong affinity that you think differently about rules, and boundaries,’ one character tells another near the end of The Adult, a classic coming-of-age story that speaks to being young and queer within the social and emotional landscape of the 21st century.

The protagonist of Bronwyn Fischer’s debut novel is in a familiar situation: At 18 years old, Natalie moves to Toronto for university and faces a blank canvas of uncertainty. Untethered from her parents and her rural hometown (‘one grocery store, one restaurant, and four churches’), she experiments with skipping class, gets drunk for the first time at frosh parties and spends time in her dorm room watching ASMR videos, with titles like ‘crunchy chicken cooked in the middle of the forest (NO TALKING),’ on YouTube.

The book is written in intimate first person, firmly planted in Natalie’s interiority. Through Natalie’s eyes, Fischer elegantly captures the young adult experience of feeling lost and seeing the world as a mirror. ‘I tried to look into some of the faces I was passing to see if they looked worried,’ she thinks, ‘ to see if any of them were also wondering if they’d gotten everything all wrong.’ As Natalie grapples with the angst of becoming a person independent from her family, she reckons with the surfacing of childhood memories as they brush up against new experiences; in this case, the shame, first experienced years ago, of her own queer awakening. Her internal world brims with creativity and metaphor, lending the prose a dreamlike quality. ‘I tried to imagine that my body was a linen closet and that, inside, everything could be folded very neatly,’ Fischer writes, one of many instances in which she transforms difficult emotions into vivid visual metaphors. Later, capturing an intense emotional interaction, she describes someone ‘look[ing] into [her] eyes as though they were a river she were about to fish.’

While moving through these experiences, Natalie often projects herself into alternate realities, imagining how her life may look different when she is older. In the grocery store, she pictures herself with more friends: ‘I wondered what I would buy at the store if I was older…I thought I would hold a phone against my ear as I shopped. Talking, not to my parents, but to a very close friend whom I respected very much… My friend on the phone would ask for my advice. I would give some, effortlessly, and I would hear that she was comforted and happy to be talking to me.’

Feeling alienated from her peers, Natalie wanders around Toronto, deciding who to be and what to like in the face of this newfound freedom. Fischer captures the loneliness that most feel when confronted with an unfamiliar environment, as well as Natalie’s unique brand of loneliness, which involves settling into her queerness in the context of an unusual age-gap relationship with a woman she meets in the park. Beautiful, enigmatic, older (though we are not told exactly how much) and recently divorced, Nora enters Natalie’s life and leaves an impression. What begins as a random encounter quickly becomes an all-consuming romance, layered with miscommunication, casual deception and remarkable intimacy. Despite their age gap and power imbalance, the central relationship in The Adult is far from a one-dimensional depiction of abuse or coercion. Treating this rich emotional terrain with nuance, The Adult is stirring and subtly sexy, depicting the electricity of love and betrayal heightened by the rawness of youth.

While The Adult explores the anxious freedom that comes from outgrowing your family, Holly Pester’s The Lodgers is a portrait of a woman obsessively returning to the scenes of her childhood and a family dynamic she’s never managed to escape. Older than Natalie but no less sure of herself, Pester’s unnamed protagonist is characterized as somewhat of a transient figure, a model of ‘Generation Rent’ who moves between sublets and sleeps on the old mattresses of strangers, existing on the periphery of other people’s lives.

In her late 30s—‘the decade of a woman’s life when her silhouette surfaces’—she returns to her hometown and sublets a room in an apartment around the corner from her childhood home. Her intention is to visit her mother, Moffa, an actress with a reputation for throwing wild parties and for her casual parental neglect. When the narrator finds her mother’s house mysteriously empty, she spends time examining the everyday clutter left behind, then returning to her sublet, which she shares with a roommate she has never met but who could return at any moment (she listens perpetually for the sound of his key in the lock).

Like Natalie, who uses her imagination to conjure alternate realities, Pester’s protagonist dissociates from her present to live in another fictional world. This imaginative work is the book’s narrative core. The Lodgers begins in first person but quickly switches to second, as the protagonist describes another woman whom she imagines moving into the sublet she has just left. ‘You’re there now,’ she thinks, ‘walking towards an address that I arrived at one year ago.’

The protagonist and her imaginary double are alike: they are both enrolled in a course on ‘TriTouch,’ a new-age massage therapy technique that involves channeling traumatic memories for psychic healing, and they both sublet the same room in a house belonging to a single mother who rents out her extra bedroom between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 a.m. (she uses the room for her work as an esthetician during the day). But as the protagonist narrates this woman’s life, she also emphasizes their differences. The other woman is younger, taller and, most importantly, was ‘uncomplicatedly nurtured as a child,’ which made her ‘a little dumb.’ ‘If you went back to your family address right now,’ she imagines, ‘if you showed up at your childhood door, someone would let you in and say, Hiya, then carry on with what they were doing.’

Much of the novel unfolds within the protagonist’s inner world, her thoughts only occasionally interrupted by accidental run-ins with neighbours and invitations to quiz night at the local pub. She avoids social interaction, preferring to exist within the fictional dialogue she has created with her replacement, imagining what her own relationship with the mother and child would have looked like, had she acted differently: ‘I remember kicking the cat food but you miss it,’ she imagines, ‘you’re already a more careful iteration, moving with the intention of a map.’ Through this imaginative reliving, the protagonist excavates unresolved feelings about childhood, innocence and responsibility.

The protagonist of The Lodgers is good company despite (and because of) her anxious spiralling, which brims with sharp observation and dry humour. Pester’s background as a poet reveals itself throughout her debut novel. ‘The world turns,’ Pester writes, ‘people are churned out and flop onto their next phase of life,’ a phrase that is characteristic of her narrator’s bleak poeticism. The Lodgers strips away some of the excitement that Fischer has built in The Adult, revealing the vulnerable side of an adulthood haunted by an early life that continues to echo.

Fischer and Pester are both interested in examining how their protagonists foster a sense of self from small choices. In The Adult, Natalie orders a beer at a bar on her first night in Toronto: ‘We were deciding what we should like. I was tempted to say that I liked the one that was dark brown, the one the bartender had said was hoppy. But it wouldn’t be true, and I thought everyone would be able to tell.’ She is acutely aware of her choices and how she believes they will be perceived by others. In The Lodgers, the protagonist describes choosing what to like as an essential act of independence. ‘I discovered that I liked to sit and crunch through a bag of salty crisps while doing a puzzle. That felt like me, so I elaborated on it…and through my desire to eat crisps and drink lemonade with pickled onions in it, [I was] able to notice what I was allowed to want.’ Being allowed to want is central to both novels, which explore, in different ways, the difficulty of belonging to yourself as a person beyond the family. For Natalie, this desire extends to navigating and embracing her queerness. Both women are earnestly devoted to this careful process of curating a sense of self—making decisions, wanting things, and from these desires creating a life.

— Alex Trnka