Book review: Triage by Claudia Rankine

At the climax of Triage, one character says to the other, ‘Your romance with grief won’t help the living.’ It’s a moving line that achieves the bold narrative shift of pushing the text’s protagonist into the role of putative villain (this is too simplistic, but to complexify it here would be challenging), but also sums up something about the text itself, which is that Triage is ultimately – and perhaps deliberately – unsatisfying.

What is certainly deliberate about Triage is its desire to resist classification. I can’t tell you if this is a novel, nor how much is fiction and how much a kind of composite, nebulous memoir. So I won’t try. We’ll call it a text.

The text’s narrator is a black academic in her early 60s whose current work is on the artistic representation of couches, the couch and its symbolic meanings functioning as a kind of natural outgrowth of a fascination with notions of collapse that began in college 40 years ago.

This fascination arose spontaneously via her meeting with the text’s other central character, known only as ‘the theorist’. Both women found in college a kind of escape from their traumatic histories, the narrator as a product of domestic abuse, the theorist a Palestinian who fled Ramallah in their youth. Together they enact a sisterhood which manifests in their falling down immediately on sight of each other. It’s a game, sort of, but one which ultimately depicts a physical and intellectual response to their own inner state and/as the state of the world.

Four decades on, the two are reunited, and the text’s climax comes when the narrator rejects the theorist’s request to illegally house a Palestinian refugee couple in her flat in Berlin. She makes excuses; perhaps they are valid. But the reader – at least, this reader – feels firmly on the side of the theorist whose verdict, both specific and expansive, is that ‘Things are unachievable only when you need the road to be short.’

Ultimately, Triage’s emotional power comes from the moment that is part reunion, part separation, in which the choice seems to be between hope and despair, between a lifting up and a falling down. The narrator chooses the latter. And it feels like Rankine does too. And maybe that’s the point. After all, beyond the climax, the narrative becomes a set of reflections that seem to justify the narrator’s ‘no’ before fracturing into a syntax-and-conclusion-less prose poem in response to the question, ‘What can be survived?’

But while there is doubtless plenty to feel bleak about in 2026, and while Rankine’s sentences are pretty and her allusiveness sometimes captivating, this reader finds it hard to choose despair when hope remains on the table. The narrator’s romance with grief isn’t what this living person wants to read about.