The heart is a peculiar organ. It wants what it wants, as Emily Dickinson wrote. Especially when you\u2019re young and have no previous experience of love and desire, or the deleterious effects of time on both. This is the core subject of 24-year-old Harriet Armstrong\u2019s debut novel, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies, published by the consistently adventurous independent press Les Fugitives.<\/p>\n
When the unnamed narrator, a\u00a0third-year psychology student, meets fellow student Luke in their campus kitchen, she falls hard. They begin sharing meals and confidences in her room, which bears a \u201csuicide beam\u201d running the length of the ceiling. This memento mori is archly juxtaposed with the narrator\u2019s breathless infatuation, which feels as if \u201csome great transition was occurring inside me, something was aligning, I could actually feel it\u201d. She finds herself \u201cwide open and completely soft like a small trembling animal held in two hands, two hands which could crush it completely but which would not\u201d.<\/p>\n
Armstrong expertly adumbrates the emotional intensity and vulnerability of first love, with every page bearing a startling observation or wry aside. The world is made anew: \u201cI had never seen a winter which was so yellow \u2026 before Luke I had never really felt gendered \u2026 Luke and I were inventing ourselves.\u201d Of course, her loved one is filtered through her perceptions, and while he\u00a0is intelligent and attractive, we can also see that he\u2019s a self-involved, self-pitying young man, with all that entails. He leaves her dangling and fails to reciprocate her abundant, overflowing emotions. Unlike us, she\u00a0can\u2019t see him objectively. Nor can\u00a0she see herself fully. While she\u2019s\u00a0aware that her self-conscious awkwardness is the result of her neurodivergence, she\u2019s yet to gain the\u00a0self-knowledge that might deter her from withholding men such as\u00a0Luke.<\/p>\n
The passage where the narrator Googles vaginal dilators will, for a number of reasons, bring tears to the eyes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And so we fear for her future the deeper she falls. What\u2019s compelling is\u00a0that unlike, say, Esther in The Bell Jar, the narrator has no perspective through which to filter her descent. At times the novel is unbearably intense, like experiencing the essence of obsession as it\u2019s lived in every moment \u2013 which is not to say that it isn\u2019t also very funny. Armstrong astutely atomises the gen Z world of online living and flat sharing: \u201cI didn\u2019t want to get up to go and make breakfast and be faced with some shirtless boy cooking ramen\u201d. The passage where the narrator Googles vaginal dilators will, for a number of reasons, bring tears to the eyes. Armstrong\u2019s voice is by turns jejune, candid and ludic, but always aware of its effects and its commitment to emotional truth.<\/p>\n
The Cartesian split alluded to in the\u00a0title is crucial. While cerebral and obsessively analytical, the narrator is equally fervent about engaging with the messily somatic: \u201cPerhaps sex was a necessary component of the life that I wanted, perhaps some things really couldn\u2019t be accessed at all except through sex.\u201d Luke is ambivalent about her joining Tinder. And so she embarks on a series of tragic dates, losing her virginity with a thirtysomething comedian in\u00a0a\u00a0sex scene of almost surreal awkwardness, but written with such dark humour and insight that it ends up feeling triumphant.<\/p>\n
Almost inevitably, Luke eventually turns away from her. Memories of their time together pour back \u201clike some biblical flood or plague\u201d. Eventually, it becomes \u201cimpossible to even breathe without thinking of Luke\u201d. At the book\u2019s close, she is invited to his 24th birthday party, aware that he\u2019s moved on but unable to process the fact, leading to a searing denouement. The final scene is as deft and devastating as the conclusion to a Cheever story. While ostensibly belonging to the subgenre of novels about young women negotiating 21st-century relationships, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a world away from the derogatory label \u201csad girl lit\u201d. It announces Armstrong as a bright and\u00a0singular voice in literary fiction.<\/p>\n