{"id":467855,"date":"2025-10-02T07:11:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T07:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/467855\/"},"modified":"2025-10-02T07:11:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T07:11:12","slug":"the-most-by-jessica-anthony-when-staying-in-the-pool-is-the-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/467855\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Most\u2019 by Jessica Anthony \u2014 When staying in the pool is the point\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.<\/p>\n

Jessica Anthony\u2019s \u201cThe Most\u201d (2024) is a 1957 domestic drama that reads like a 2025 group chat: lots of polite exclamation points, even more swallowed resentment and one woman who decides she\u2019s done performing and doing \u201cwhat good people do.\u201d The premise is deceptively tiny: on a freak-warm Sunday in Newark, Delaware, Kathleen Beckett skips church and slips into the apartment complex pool and won\u2019t come out. That\u2019s it. That\u2019s the plot. And it\u2019s thrilling. Critics have called<\/a> this slim novel (one-sitting, eight hours in-book time) a portrait of a marriage at its breaking point and a sharply observed slice of its era; they\u2019re right on both counts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s also a manual for modern femininity disguised as a mid-century dress pattern: if the world hands you a script, revise the stage directions and refuse to leave the water.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kathleen\u2019s world is built from rituals so small you barely notice you\u2019re agreeing to them until your life is entirely made of them. \u201cIt was the little things, she knew by now, the small repetitions, that made a life\u201d (p. 15). The novel\u2019s feminist heat comes from how clearly it names those repetitions \u2014 church, dinner, deference \u2014 and then has the audacity to interrupt them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was Virgil\u2019s idea to bring the family to church each week. It\u2019s what people did\u201d (p. 22). People did; Kathleen didn\u2019t. Modern femininity, Anthony suggests, isn\u2019t always a roar. Sometimes it\u2019s the soft click of a boundary being set and held.<\/p>\n

Kathleen\u2019s choice of husband was also, notably, an interesting one. \u201cShe made the decision that if she ever got married . . . it would only be to someone who hated conflict as much as she did\u201d (p. 32). Enter Virgil, whose primary gift is friction reduction. \u201cIn the end, Kathleen always arrived at the same conclusion: she married Virgil Beckett because he was easy\u201d (p. 52).\u00a0<\/p>\n

If this sounds like self-betrayal, the book refuses to wag its finger. \u201cEasy\u201d isn\u2019t condemned; it\u2019s examined. What looks like comfort at 23 can calcify into erasure at 33, and the novel shows how that happens in real time \u2014 over a single day \u2014 without cartoon villains. (As the Chicago Review of Books points out<\/a>, the omniscient narration lets us see the blind spots of both spouses; nobody\u2019s evil, but inertia can be.)<\/p>\n

About that pool. Kathleen\u2019s insistence on staying put is not dramatic theater, it\u2019s administrative feminism: paperwork for the self. \u201cKathleen\u2019s reason for being in the pool wasn\u2019t anyone\u2019s business but his own\u201d (p. 43). The pronoun glitch is the point \u2014 the language of her world doesn\u2019t quite fit her interiority. In 1957, that sentence scans as defiance. Now in 2025, it lands like a group-texted \u201cDon\u2019t call, I\u2019m not coming.\u201d Same energy as skipping the family FaceTime, turning off location sharing or telling Slack you\u2019re \u201cOOO\u201d and meaning it. The method is small, the meaning is not.<\/p>\n

Anthony knits the domestic plot to a second theme: tennis. The title refers to a move Kathleen learned from her Czech coach, Billy Blasko \u2014 most means \u201cbridge.\u201d You draw your opponent forward, lull them to the net then hit the ball where they cannot follow. The pool day is that shot. She brings Virgil into confrontation territory he\u2019d rather avoid, then aims the conversation somewhere new, toward the actual terms of their life, not the performance of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The book is also painfully honest about the stories women tell themselves to survive a boxed-in life. Kathleen\u2019s past as a near-elite tennis player hums under her marriage like a fluorescent light. She turns down the scout Randy Roman \u201cnot because she loved Virgil Beckett more than tennis but because she hated losing\u201d (p. 74). The line is devastating because it rings true in 1957 and 2025: how often do women recast ambition as aversion to avoid being punished for wanting? Likewise, the ghost of Billy Blasko: \u201cShe knew that if she saw him in person, he would ask her to marry him, and she did not want him to ask. She was afraid she might say yes\u201d (p. 52). That\u2019s not indecision; it\u2019s fluency in the social costs of \u201cno.\u201d<\/p>\n

Virgil, for his part, isn\u2019t a monster. He\u2019s a stellar avatar for the patriarchy\u2019s middle manager: decent, dutiful and absolutely committed to the policy manual. He\u2019s the one who suggests church because it\u2019s what people did. He\u2019s the guy who will do the dishes without noticing the water\u2019s been draining from his wife for years. For a contemporary parallel: he\u2019s the partner who is \u201cso supportive\u201d but keeps scheduling your life into his calendar invites. The novel doesn\u2019t cancel him; it forces him to learn a new game.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So where does modern femininity enter? Everywhere. In 1957, Kathleen\u2019s refusal is radical because it\u2019s private. Today, our refusals are public and branded \u2014 social posts about boundaries, calendar blocks labeled \u201ctherapy,\u201d newsletters about \u201csaying no.\u201d Both are bridges: invitations that pull the other player forward and then send the ball somewhere they didn\u2019t expect.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By the end, \u201cThe Most\u201d doesn\u2019t throw a martini in anyone\u2019s face. It does something braver. It lets a woman stay in the water long enough that the men on the deck have to decide who they are without her compliance. It\u2019s funny in a dry, mid-century way; it\u2019s serious in a way that makes your throat tight. Mostly, it feels current: an argument for quiet tactics in loud times, for the feminist power of staying put until the conversation changes.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques. Jessica Anthony\u2019s \u201cThe Most\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467856,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,156039,156040,156041,156042,156043,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-467855","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-femininity","11":"tag-feminist","12":"tag-jessica-anthony","13":"tag-kathleen-beckett","14":"tag-the-most","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115303329987747233","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467855\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}