Book Review : Charlene Elsby - Psychros (2021)
Why do men take out their pain on other people and women on themselves?
I’m thirty-nine and I’ve lost plenty of people in my life. Some closer than others. I’ve seen my loved ones cry their hearts out in funeral parlours and the only time I ever shed a tear myself was when I had to put down my dog Scarlett a year ago. Holy shit, I cried harder than I ever did in my lifetime. But it prodded a weird, ugly little feeling within: was it the first time I felt the way I was supposed to feel about tragedy? Was I psychopath for crying my dog harder than any human being?
I revisited some of these feelings while reading Charlene Elsby’s new novel Psychros and found a little solace.
In Psychros, Charlene Elsby’s trademark nameless narrator is celebrating at another character’s memorial. She meets a man named Jeff, who she has sex with. She also meets a man named Ethan, which she has sex with. The more she is trying to live ferociously, the more her dead boyfriend Sam starts emerging in her consciousness and haunting her every thoughts and actions. She starts to understand the reasons why she refused to grieve and why she’s taking it out on the world.
The violence of despair
Charlene Elsby isn’t the easiest one to read. She writes in a jagged, stream-of-consciousness series of confessional thoughts that sometimes entertain circular thinking patterns. Reading her work really feels like you’re inside someone’s mind, witnessing all the ugly, stray thoughts everyone of us secretly have. It was the same thing in her previous novel Hexis, except for one important detail: this narrator isn’t quite a violent psychopath. She’s just very fucking angry.
What she’s angry against makes her very interesting to me: she’s angry that her boyfriend took his life away. That he felt entitled to let his own pain devastate her life. That her preferred leaving her alone to finding support. This is a pretty loaded question. What makes you think you’re important enough to break the heart of the people who love you? I know enough about depression to know it doesn’t work like that, but aren’t survivors entitled to their own feelings?
Taking your own life is someone’s prerogative, but accepting it and crying you like you believe you deserve is the prerogative of the people who survive you. It’s ugly. It’s socially unacceptable, but don’t lie to yourself: haven’t you ever struggled with these feelings yourself? Feeling like you should be feeling differently, but not finding the strength or the will to be proper. Psychros bluntly and courageously examines these feelings through fiction that feels pretty fucking real.
The reliable unreliable narrator
Psychros feels surreal and dreamlike, but it’s by design. Charlene Elsby isn't interested in conventional realism. What she’s trying to extract is the emotional truth of being angry at someone you should socially not be angry with. There’s an agenda to it. The narrator claims that men are OK to lay waste and cause devastation while she is the proof that this boundary is a lot murkier for women. I don’t disagree with that, but I think she makes a broader point than that.
Occidental society might be engineered according to gendered standards, but they affect everyone. The taboos and the rigidity of our rituals regarding death is turning people’s lives upside down. It changes some of us. Is it a gender thing? Is it a Judeo-Christian thing? Whatever that is, Charlene Elsby’s narrator’s struggle to keep herself sane is the bedrock to this reflection against ideas that have pervaded her society. It’s moving, courageous and it rings truer than any from of realism.
*
I’ve read Psychros in one rapturous sitting in a four hour-long car ride. It was measuring itself to B.R Yeager’s splendid Negative Space, which I had finished twenty-four hours before and it did great for itself. Psychros is an angry, difficult and fearless statement against status quo. It is a pair of middle fingers right up in the air against the way we live our lives and the way think about the world now. I loved it. I should’ve known that CLASH Books would come up with goods again.
