Review: Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

By Simon Demetriou

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

 Ranting has something of a bad name. People who rant might be a little unhinged. Or taking themselves – and their topic – too seriously. But a good rant is magnificent. You don’t need so many words, sure. But if you pile up the words, the tautologies, the repetitions, the variations, just right, you can make something decadent, something breath-taking. The first moment of Checkout 19 that takes the breath away, for me, is Claire-Louise Bennett’s beautiful, and utterly relatable, tirade about the empty promises made by the education system to the children of working-class parents in working-class towns.

But it’s not just ranting that Bennett does so brilliantly in Checkout 19. She also eulogises. She sketches. She exhibits. She reminisces. She brings to life. But everywhere, this is a book that uses more words where fewer might have done. And so it should, because this is a book about reading, about how reading brings one to life, and how reading is a way out of and into lives we may wish to shake off or burrow our way into.

The vivacity of language and its capacity to reposition both the reader and the writer is not just a theme but a method for Bennett. The nameless narrator, who shares many biographical details with her author (as a working-class girl from the west country who studies English Literature in London before moving to Ireland and writing for a living) flits between first, second and third persons, between past, present and future tenses. She brings us close, pushes us away, orients, reorients and disorients us, even as Bennett depicts her creation’s own shimmering, shifting, unstable identities.

Checkout 19 doesn’t just pile up words and identities. It piles up books. So many books are mentioned in this novel, that I would recommend it simply on the basis that it’s a much more engaging way of finding new books to read than browsing bestseller lists or online ratings and reviews.

Yet there are many more reasons why you should read this book. Most of these might be summed up in the word ‘perhaps’. Bennett writes ‘perhaps’ 122 times in this novel of around 240 pages. It is critical because this book deals with the infinite slippery possibility of memory, of literature, and of life. Certainty is peddled by liars, demagogues and school teachers. Open a book – open this book – and you’ll find that ‘you don’t ever step into the same book twice after all’, because neither you nor the book that brings you to life are ever truly fixed in place.