I was gob-smacked by this author’s last book, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, and when I saw she had another book out—one set in Ireland, one of my favorite settings—I immediately requested a DRC. Thank you to Net Galley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for letting me read it free in exchange for this honest review. The book is for sale now.

Had I no obligation to the publisher, I might be tempted to write a rare one-word review: bleak. Our protagonist is grieving the death of her beloved grandmother, and the dog died too. She’s stuck in a place she can’t get out of mentally, but since she is an artist, she takes her ennui and lets it guide her through art, and the narrative follows a pattern in which each grim thought leads her to a different art theme mentally. The story is told in the first person, and so we follow her miserable wandering thoughts from one grim topic to another, and then at some point each train of thought ends with “Works about [ fill in noun here: beds, rabbits…whatever].”

“The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed.”

Yup.

I continued reading because it seemed to me that her earlier book started out depressing and it took some time to warm up, but then once it took off I was in love with it. I waited for this to happen here. And waited. At the 16% mark, she notes that getting drunk provides her with a “heightened sense of despair” the next day, and my notes my notes say something I cannot print. It's just so everlastingly grim!

The protagonist tells us of an instance when she follows her very elderly landlady down a set of steps and pretends this is her usual pace also, and my notes say, “What the hell else you gonna do? Tell her to move her butt? Give her a shove to help her along?”

Each time I have one of these magic moments, I know it’s time to read something else for a while and come back to this story with fresh eyes. This is why it took me so long to read and review. Had I not bailed at 68% and peeked at the end for some sign of redemption, it would have gone even more slowly. Our protagonist has family members that want to help, but she is not interested. Instead, we notice dead animals; we notice garbage. We notice mold and other ugly things, but we can’t get up and deal with them because we are depressed and going to continue sitting here, lying here, not seeking change and wallowing.

In fairness, the word smithery here is strong in places, and I like the figurative language. However, for me the double-whammy of perpetually depressed prose followed, every now and then, by reflections about art and art history, a subject that makes my eyes glaze over, is a powerful repellent, and I am never able to engage; perhaps by now, you suspected as much.

So the third star is here because I know there are readers that have a great love of art, and if you are one of them, your experience with this novel may be completely different from mine. I wanted to tell the protagonist to take her meds and shut up, but there may be some truly redemptive aspect of the art discussion that makes the rest of it flow beautifully for art lovers.

For most readers, I can’t recommend this novel, and if you take it up anyway, put the sharps in another room and lock up your pills and firearms. Seriously. But for those with an affinity for art and art history, this book should be considered.

After Frankie’s grandmother dies, she convinces her mother to let her stay in her grandmother’s cottage taking care of and preparing the place to be sold. Frankie needs this time away, because, despite at twenty-six, she is finding life increasingly difficult to navigate. She is an artist, but is not finding any success or even inspiration in the world around her. Instead, her job as an intern at a gallery and her life in Dublin feel like the barest imitation of living. She hopes that by stripping away the modern world she can find her way back to the creation of art—what she believes herself meant to do.

A Line Made by Walking is deeply introspective reading. Baume is one of those authors who uses words in a way that feels as if they are pouring directly out of the heart—which is enticing and terrifying at the same time. Frankie is sinking in the quicksand of her depression. Part of me wants nothing more than to slam the book shut—as if her despair and ennui are infectious. As if I will slow down and become mired in those feelings. It’s possible.

I do almost nothing, just barely enough to keep myself from turning to stone. I perform only the most necessary tasks at the barest level of involvement. Shower without soaping, eat without cooking, read without concentrating.

The novel is ponderous in its melancholy for a life wasted. Not wasted in a gone-wrong, should-have-contributed-more way but in a sadness for the person wasting it away. Frankie doesn’t harm anyone, she is not a burden, but her physical inertia, literally lying on the floor, is painful. If you’re at a point in your life where you know exactly what you want or you have accomplished everything you set out to do than A Line Made by Walking will be anthropological reading—a treatise about a species foreign to you—the kind of human who endlessly questions, whose uncertainty leads nowhere. A novel of beautiful writing about a very sad woman. If you are anything like Frankie the novel will be a lead weight of recognition. Either way, it’s an indication of how well Baume does the job of exploring the relationship between art and depression and relating its realities.

It’s time to accept that I am average, and to stop making this acceptance of my averageness into a bereavement.

Oh it was so heavy.
Let me start by saying that Ms. Baume is one of the most talented young authors I have found in years. I loved her last book; it made my top 10 of the year for 2016. I heard about this new novel and was immediately excited to read. The book is well-written and well-paced.
But oh my goodness was it a challenge to be in the main character's head. I felt physically heavier as the story progressed and had to set it aside for a few days. This is not meant as a "don't read it" warning, just as a "be in the right frame of mind" note. I felt the same way with her first book... but kept thinking about it, thinking of the characters, which I anticipate will be the case here.
Frankie, the main character, has a habit of recalling art installations about various subjects to "test" herself and ground herself. That was a brilliant plot move, and survival tactic: details of other people's art installations, and her own memories of them, created structure and connection to the world as she felt herself crumbling away. The chapters are framed as Frankie's own art installation, and rather than being put off or grossed out by her morbid interest in dead animals, I found her self-imposed rules sympathetic and quite sweet.
In the end, I really liked this novel. It can be hard to stay with a character actively trying to remove herself from the world, but I never wanted to stop reading, just had to give myself some breaks. I will spend some time this week researching some of the art installations, and know I will want to revisit some of the chapters as I go.

I quite liked Baume’s earlier book, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, so was looking forward to reading her latest. BUT I don’t understand why the [GoodReads] ratings are so much higher for the newer work. For me, not so much.

2.5 rounding up to 3—because of its originality and writing. [same holds true for Spill…, for me, a far better book, IMHO]

Struggling to cope with urban life-and life in general-Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to her family's rural house on "turbine hill," vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier. 

Well yes, but… Frankie did not resonate with me—but I did love her reminiscences about grandmother—she was quite a character!

Frankie is lonely and alone. A failed artist. Hobby: taking photographs of animals—BUT they must be dead. Chapter names follow these creatures. Boxed in by her own rules. Her camera and her project. Her overwhelming sadness and depression.

There were many sentences and phrases that I liked—descriptions were vivid and wonderful. Slight humor but truly enjoyed it when on board.

For example:

“Now I wonder if maybe my father’s Incredible Hulk impression is the reason I’ve never shown any respect for fully buttoned shirts.”

“… shopping trolleys are roller skates for housewives and old women.”

“”… I hazily contemplated giving up some vice for Lent, not in the name of religious observance, but just to practice asserting willpower. I tried to think of a vice I want to sacrifice, and ended up reasoning that I need my bad habits, desperately, just to coax myself through each day.”

“conversational insubordination”

“Ten brought with it the gravity of having existed for an entire decade the emblematic jump to double figures. I could never be a single, solid digit again. In the final months of being nine, ten seemed to represent the death of childhood.”

“… clouds are the facial expressions of the atmosphere…”

Describing a guinea pig as “… not a Shackleton sort…”

And, I loved the story of her birth.

But, I was never really engaged and the story felt flat. I cannot understand the high ratings; it just didn’t do it for me.

I wonder if the numerous illustrations referred to in this e-text [blank, but noted at the end] would have added something- I think so, but doubt it would have changed my overall opinion.

Charles Bukowski once said.....
"Being alone never felt right. Sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right."

In "A Line Made by Walking", 25 year old Frankie, an artist, spends a lot of time being alone. Seeking relief from inner pain she associates with city life in Dublin.....her art, job, friends, and a general sense of her failed self, she retreats to her deceased grandmother's Bungalow. Frankie has lost her sense of 'self', and 'purpose'. She isn't sure she wants to live.

The solitary life that Frankie is living.....[often with lovely 'stream-of-consciousness' prose], speaks intimately to the reader.
We observe this lonesome character carefully - get inside her head with her....feel her grief. Frankie is morning her grandmother-while struggling to survive the thoughts inside her head.
She thinks about her childhood- her grandmother- mother - father - school friends - books - death- various artists, art projects and rules she designs for herself.
While lying on the amber carpet in the Bungalow, Frankie takes to crying, or eating a chocolate bar, or looking through magazines, and reading a book every night ....or thinking about favorite musicians. She examines the trinkets left behind that belonged to her grandmother. ....she sips drinks... thinks about herself vs. other people....comparing differences. She begins decoding samplings of art. It almost begins to feel like an addiction- but maybe it was a focus she needed to experience feeling worthy in an ordinary world. It's a little complex - yet had a meditative inquiry feeling.

Frankie has her camera -- and a project ( rules to her project: she will photograph dead animals). The ten animals Frankie photographs are of a ROBIN, RABBIT, RAT, MOUSE, ROOK, FOX, HARE, HEDGEHOG, and BADGER.

I found it easy to relate to Frankie. She felt loss - alone in the world - but she didn't consider herself sick. Yet - over time it's clear depression and anxiety has been with her as long as she can remember.

Frankie said:,
"I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone".

This next excerpt from Frankie resonated with me:
"I am not sick, just lost. And lostness is an entirely fixable state. Whereas sickness – – mind – – sickness in particular – – is entirely contrary, intangible, unfixable. And I am calmed by this idea, encouraged. And so I go on."
"There really isn't much wrong with me, I say it's just that, well, I'm not like other people; I don't want the things they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other peoples eyes, and I feel as though they feel they are duty-bound to normalize me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want, you know?"

Rich, and intimate! Sara Baume makes an indelible impression and avoids lapses into sentimentality -- yet is a powerful and compelling story. - BEAUTIFUL BOOK!!!

Thank You Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Netgalley, and Sara Baume

"The world is wrong. It took me twenty-five years to realize and now I don't think I can bear it anymore. The world is wrong, and I am too small to fix it, too self-absorbed."

In her second novel, Baume explores the plight of twenty-five-year-old Frankie, an art-school graduate, who retreats to her grandmother's house in the country to heal after she begins to crack up in the city. Before the dangerous psychological descent which spurs her to break her bedsit lease and summon her mother to collect her and her things, Frankie had temporary work at a Dublin art gallery, puttying and painting walls in preparation for new art installations and serving as a general dogsbody. That menial work was a long ways from youthful dreams of making art. "My small world is coming apart," she observes, "because it is swelling and there's no place for me any longer . . ." Frankie has been "grounded", literally spending her days lying low--her cheek pressed against the dingy bedsit's shag carpet. She seldom eats and rarely responds to the phone.

After a brief time at her family home, a renovated "famine hospital" (an historical place of suffering that dates from the 1840s), Frankie flees both from her parents and the dependent, passive role she assumes while living with them, to live in her deceased grandmother's damp, derelict, country bungalow, with its pervasive smell of dog. Perched on a hill, the structure vibrates and hums in time with the large wind turbine that stands behind it and disturbs the air around it. The house is supposed to be up for sale, but there is little buyer interest. It has sat empty for almost three years, and nearly everything needs fixing. Slugs slime surfaces, and dead flies lie exactly where they dropped. Frankie alters almost nothing, partly because she is so profoundly enervated, but also in a kind of homage to her grandmother. The sights Frankie sees from the windows of the house, the objects she touches within it, and the pathways she treads out from it are still infused with the spirit of her grandmother.

Frankie's parents are nervous about their daughter's isolation and solitude, but she is convinced it is just what she needs: "My parents did not want me to come here to stay. They are, like everybody, fearful of being completely alone and suspicious of people who choose to be. They hesitate, like everybody, to understand how it could heal me as I believe it can." They and Frankie's well-put-together sister, Jane, do not figure prominently as characters, appearing only for brief episodes, but those episodes are telling. Frankie's mother is a steady presence in her daughter's psyche; she is worrisome, says Frankie, but, as the reader soon realizes, possessed of grace, acceptance and remarkable restraint given her daughter's precarious psychological state. She is also a fount of knowledge, particularly about the natural world, and she has an unusual and intuitive sense of the rituals that a situation may require. For example, not knowing what to do with some curios her mother (Frankie's grandmother) has left behind, she buries them near the hedge outside the house. They couldn't be given to charity, she tells Frankie, and it seemed wrong to throw them away. When Frankie arrives, one of the first things she does is dig up the objects and restore them to their place on the windowsill. At one point, Frankie's father drives out to the house to mow the lawn. With a few deft brush strokes about his and Frankie's awkward sharing of tea after the yard work, the author reveals the man's brusque masculinity and communicates the uncomfortable love between the two. The sensitive and particular details about the objects and memories the grandmother has left behind will resonate for readers who have had a special relationship with their own grandmothers. They certainly did for me.

Baume's novel brings an artist's attentive eye to the emotional and "interior" life of a single character. It will not suit everyone. Devoid of incident in the most literal sense, the novel focuses instead on the ebb and flow of feeling and memory in a young woman absorbed in her own psychic processes. Because everything that is related to the reader is filtered through Frankie’s consciousness and told in the present tense (with occasional flashbacks to childhood incidents and the events that precipitated the breakdown) I found the narrative to be powerfully claustrophobic at times. It was not a book I could read steadily in one sitting. Occasionally, I also felt overloaded by a surfeit of sensory detail and by the (over)abundant references (I counted more than 70) to artists and works of art.

As a fairly recent art-college graduate and one casting about for her way in life, Frankie tries to maintain her mental faculties by "testing" herself on the artists she has encountered in her education and by describing their works. I found reading the book on an electronic device to be very helpful as I encountered these; I could easily google the works of art alluded to--almost all of them entirely unknown to me. (I recommend viewing and, in some cases, hearing, the works to better understand the text. Most of them simply cannot be adequately visualized.) I wonder at the author's decision to refer to quite so many pieces of art. The allusions do not always serve to illuminate character or advance the themes of the book, and they seemed to me to become something of an obsessive exercise. Maybe that was by design. (I admit, too, that I found many of the art projects bizarre and the sanity of their creators questionable.)

Baume's work encourages the reader to consider the purpose, place, and need for art in life. One function of art is to jolt the viewer into really looking at the world. By drawing unusual connections between things--objects and ideas--artists make us see with new eyes. Sometimes, however, the creator seems to create simply to provoke. Only minimally acquainted with modern and performance art, I confess that I was unimpressed with and derived little meaning from many of the creations Frankie describes: an artist spending hours collecting pollen from blossoms to make large yellow squares on the floor; an artist sanding white marble slabs on which milk is then poured and coaxed to the edges; an artist making films of himself tumbling into a canal or off a roof into shrubbery; or an artist walking back and forth across a field for hours just to make a straight line in the vegetation for a scene that can be photographed--the famous "Line Made by Walking" for which the novel is named. (Don't get me started on Marina Abramovic's bizarre "Rhythm 0" project in which the performance artist stood passively for six hours straight so that gallery goers could use objects she had supplied to write on her, razor away her clothing (leaving her naked), slash her skin in order to suck her blood, and commit (minor) sexual assault. The purpose of the piece, Abromovic said, was to find out how far the public would go. I would have thought that Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a police blotter, or the Holocaust would have provided answers enough to that question.)

Through her protagonist, the author explores conventional responses to mental illness: religion, meditation, psychoactive medication, regular exercise, and social interaction. Frankie considers and rejects all of these, opting instead for solitude, bike rides, and immersion in the natural world around her grandmother's home. To use a phrase from Thomas Moore, she "cares for the soul." Baume appears to question the current medicalized view of a breakdown as a purely physical process--a disruption in brain biochemistry that can be cured by pouring on the chemicals--suggesting that it might otherwise be viewed as existential, a turning point in one's development, a time to reassemble the pieces of oneself into a new configuration, keeping some, discarding others. As Frankie tells the foreign doctor who attempts to force her into a program of pharmaceuticals: "I'm not like other people; I don't want what they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other people's eyes, and I feel they are duty-bound to normalise me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want . . ."

During her time in the country, she begins to work on a project which involves taking photographs of animals that have died, but not at her hands: "a series about how everything is being slowly killed." I was uncertain what to make of this. Did it represent the morbid preoccupation of the depressed person, a kind of defiance of the societal denial of death, a form of bearing witness to the overlooked creatures with whom we share the world, or an almost Buddhist meditative act to acknowledge the fate that awaits all sentient beings? I admit that Frankie's project made me uncomfortable. Though I have been able to be present at the deaths of humans and animals I have loved, I find almost unbearable to witness or contemplate the wordless suffering of animals. I understand that some of the author's own photographs are to appear in the final text. I have seen some of them in the press, and they are delicate, poignant, and heartbreaking. I think their inclusion will assist readers in interpreting the work.

At the end of the novel, Frankie performs a paradoxical act of destruction and mercy after which she seems to gather some energy “to fix things", to move on--in short to become unstuck, more free. While Frankie's narrative concludes in an open-ended way, there is hopefulness. I will leave future readers to discover how Frankie's condition resolves.

A Line Made by Walking is an unusual, uncomfortable, honest, and rich work that deserves a second reading. I understand that the author has no immediate plans to return to writing and is turning back to her first love: art. If she does make something out of words again, I will be sure to read it.

I am grateful to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Netgalley for providing me with a digital ARC of the book. I am also grateful to the author for articulating something so difficult so beautifully.

Spill Simmer Falter Wither was a gem of a novel which I loved so hopes were high for A Line Made by Walking.
Returning to her Grandmother's house on Turbine Hill, so called because of the wind turbine outside, Frankie is slowly falling apart. Rescued from her Dublin flat by her mother, Frankie is hoping the tranquil setting will allow her to slowly recover. Interspersed with snapshots of art and artists, and flash backs to her life in Dublin that led to her breakdown Frankie uses her own artistic skills to photograph nature, primarily dead animals she comes across as she cycles around the winding country lanes. You get the feeling it is her way of clinging onto who she is, an artist , the person that has been lost to mental illness.
Throughout Baume makes you acutely aware of Frankie's loneliness, her inability to successfully communicate with people, and her general despair. You find yourself willing Frankie to seek the help she so desperately needs and to get better.
Its not an easy read but the wonderful writing will totally submerge you in Frankie's despair. and her small but concerted efforts to fight her way back to some form of normality.
A stunning second novel that will only cement her reputation as an accomplished and talented writer..