Powered by secrets

On December 27, 2021, the New Yorker published Parul Sehgal’s brilliant, definitive essay “The Case Against the Trauma Plot”. But the trauma plot survived unscathed. It is positively thriving, and well on its way to becoming the murder-mystery of our day.

All murder-mysteries require a body: a human being brought to a violent, untimely, possibly painful end. It is uncontroversial to note that we don’t actually care about these dead people, or about their grieving friends and relatives. No serious artistic effort is expended on making them real to us. The point of the genre is the puzzle: who or why dunnit, and whether we can be clever enough to piece together method or motivation before the denouement. Yet there must be a body, powering the novel with its radioactive thrill. If the mystery concerned somebody’s stolen iPhone the pages would no longer turn themselves.

The trauma plot, likewise, is powered by secrets and suspense. The sustaining mystery is the nature of the trauma: we read on to find out what it was or will be. Following the success of the pioneering trauma novels A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing (2013) by Eimear McBride and A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara, the past decade has hosted so many iterations of the genre that it is now as comfortable and clichéd as an episode of Midsomer Murders. As with those unreal bodies, the rape or the incest or the self-harm or the assault at the heart of it all no longer feels particularly vivid or painful to the reader. It is the lust for revelation that excites.

The arc of Evie Wyld’s fêted career is an object lesson in the numbing effects of traumafication. Her first two novels employed an elegant two-strand structure to enfold and conceal past pain. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (TLS, September 18, 2009) explored generational war trauma by alternating the narratives of Frank and his father, Leon, a Vietnam veteran whose own father fought in Korea. All the Birds, Singing (TLS, June 21, 2013) told the story of a woman called Jake who grows up in Australia (as Wyld did), but flees to England after an unspecified harrowing event. This forward-moving narrative is interleaved with another in which we travel backwards into Jake’s past, leading to the revelation of the buried trauma. The Bass Rock (2020) complicated the formula by introducing a third narrative strand. The novel follows three women in three periods – the eighteenth century, the post-Second World War years and the present day. More stories mean more traumas and more destructive coping strategies. The 1940s sections are beautifully observed, tantalizing proof of what this talented writer is capable of. Elsewhere the prose and characterization give way to an increasing reliance on naked sensationalism.

The title of Wyld’s new novel, The Echoes, is presumably meant to sound wistful and haunting. Actually it’s more a case of cacophonic reverb, an untenable proliferation of both narratives and traumas. There is Max, the ghost of a British creative writing teacher who doesn’t know why he has died. And, in another narrative strand there is his Australian girlfriend, Hannah, living through the days leading up to Max’s sudden death. In a further strand Hannah (partially) remembers her traumatic rural childhood. But there is also testimony from Hannah’s father, Piers; from her mother, Kerry; her sister Rachel; her grandmother Talia; her uncle Tony; Tony’s girlfriend, Melissa; and Mr Manningtree, an old neighbour of Hannah’s family during her childhood.

Wyld is often – justly – described as an “intricate” novelist. Looking back over the novel one can indeed identify a complex, even slightly fussy patterning at work. But the actual experience of reading The Echoes is more ADHD than intricate: there are too many narrative strands, too many stitches for the bewildered reader to drop. All the various plots and subplots are propelled by heavily trailed secrets. And every secret conceals a trauma. Hannah keeps flashing on her childhood, but she won’t explain why. “From somewhere comes the smell of suncream and a sharp pain in my gut. I close the door and breathe through a swell of nausea, swallow it back down.” References to her past are truncated, occluded. When talking to a friend: “We swapped childhoods, I told her a safe version of Rach leaving”. What’s the unsafe version? You’ll have to read on to find out. And so on, in every other plot line. This makes The Echoes a hard novel to discuss without spoilers. So, for the sake of good practice, I will separate the questions from the answers.

How did Max die? Before he died, why was Hannah bleeding painfully from the vagina, and why did she keep this a secret from Max? Why does Hannah insist, with maddening quirkiness, on making several cups of coffee for herself at the same time? Why do memories of her past prompt her to self-harm? Why can’t she stomach goat’s cheese? What was the nature of the violence wreaked on Indigenous Australians in the schoolhouse that Mr Manningtree inherited from his parents? Where does Hannah’s mother, Kerry, disappear to for days at a time? Why is she always baking terrible cakes? How did Hannah’s uncle Tony get his scars? Why is Tony’s girlfriend, Melissa, so uptight? Why does Hannah carry around a photograph of her grandmother as a young girl, and what happened to that young girl after she reached Australia? And why – the biggest question of all – did Hannah’s beloved sister Rachel leave home, and why did this disappearance then lead Hannah to cut contact with her family?

The answers, in no particular order, are: heroin addiction, rape, madness, suicide, more rape, incest, beating, sexual exploitation, road accident, secret abortion, eye-gouging, alcoholism, incarceration, child abuse. I think it’s probably OK for me to tell you why Kerry’s cakes are so terrible: “She’s putting her secrets in those cakes and that is why the cakes come out bitter and hard and unlovely”. Rachel’s secret, on which the whole implausible saga rests, is guessable long in advance. Colonel Mustard in the billiard room with the lead piping!

Multiple secrets, artificially withheld over hundreds of pages: could there be a cruder way to generate tension? Or a more tiresome objective correlative than the overused self-harm trope? These days characters seem to whip out a razor blade at the first hint of a feeling or a memory. But, as is always the case with Wyld’s novels, some of the writing is genuinely, frustratingly good. The best moments here concern Max and Hannah’s relationship. There is a tender, funny account of them considering al fresco sex and deciding against it. There is the ghost Max’s clear-eyed memory of their convincingly ordinary love. “Can you propose to someone when you’re in the middle of a fight? It was those times I felt most in need of her.” Despite his death the mood in these sections is broadly comic – I kept thinking of the bittersweet shtick of Monica Heisey’s divorce novel, Really Good, Actually (2023).

A charitable interpretation of Wyld’s process might be that she was aiming for an expansive mixed-register family epic exploring the ways in which trauma echoes down and through the generations. Unfortunately the comedy sits uneasily alongside the darker material. (Good tragicomic fiction is relatively rare – see the work of Julie Maxwell, Joe Dunthorne and Luke Brown for some successful examples.) As for the trauma – it’s simply not that traumatic.

Just as it is uncontroversial to note that we don’t care about the dead body in a murder-mystery, it should be straightforward to admit that, on a literary level, we don’t really care about the rape or the self-harm or the abuse in a novel such as The Echoes. Quite simply, there is far too much going on here for us to get to know the characters well enough to feel for them. It’s all revelation and titillation. Authorial intention is disconcertingly murky. We know that Agatha Christie doesn’t expect the reader to produce compassion for the murder victim. But what of the author of the trauma-plot novel? Is she trying and failing to make us empathize, or cynically using trauma to generate narrative tension, or both? “I wanted everything turned up a little too high”, said Hanya Yanagihara of A Little Life. “I wanted it to feel a bit vulgar in places” (see the Observer, July 26, 2015).

There is, of course, a place for the serious depiction of trauma in literature. For recent, superlative examples, see Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings (2023), which includes a patient, unflinching account of an unwanted teenage pregnancy, or Will and Testament (2016; 2019 in English translation) by Vigdis Hjorth, a wise and stylish exploration of the impact of childhood incest on a family in the decades following the original trauma. But the sheer number of plot-propelling traumas in The Echoes means it is hard to read it as anything other than entertainment.

And yet, nestled within all these made-up tragedies is a real, historical trauma – that of many Indigenous Australian children who were abducted from their families by “educational” institutions and routinely abused in the name of betterment. This feels like a serious misstep. Again, authorial intention is unclear. Is Wyld making a point about collective trauma or the universality of suffering? Is it a hasty, dutiful attempt to acknowledge the experience of the colonized in this novel full of traumatized white people? Whatever the motivation, the result is decidedly off-key, equivalent to Madeleine McCann popping up in a Miss Marple.

Which leaves only one question left to answer, for the time is ripe: who will write us the Northanger Abbey of the contemporary trauma novel?

Claire Lowdon’s novel Left of the Bang was published in 2015

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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