To review a novel grappling with PTSD is to write in the shadow of Parul Sehgal’s recent New Yorker essay “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” in which the critic suggests that trauma disorders have become contemporary narratives’ de facto explanation for any problem. A terrible family reunion is the novel’s (and Vivian’s) fracture point. As her grip on this veneer of total control begins slipping, Post-Traumatic spirals into chaos. She is more fragile than she at first appears, precariously juggling a fractured family life, an often triggering job, disordered-eating patterns, complicated friendships and rivalries, and the dull morass of contemporary online dating.
But as the novel unfurls, Vivian’s humor and single-mindedness are revealed to be tenuous coping mechanisms. Hitting back at a popular book on PTSD, Vivian jokes that the worst thing about experiencing abuse isn’t empathizing with your abuser - it’s “being the only girl in your kindergarten class with HPV.” Rape jokes are a tricky endeavor Johnson has a canny sense of the thin line between dark comedy and the grotesque. The friends get high, watch Unsolved Mysteries, and spin their stories of survival into comedy. It is hand in glove with the patriarchal order. The two bond over their shared trauma: “They felt united together against everyone else, and considered themselves The Only People Talking About Rape, the Only People Brave Enough to Mention Rape Indiscriminately Whether in a Classroom or at Parties, in a Crowded Cafe or Your Grandmother’s Living Room, While Everyone Else in the World is Completely Useless in this Area.” In a post–Me Too landscape, their world is riddled privately and publicly by survivors and perpetrators rape culture, as Vivian and Jane repeatedly point out, permeates every aspect of our world. Both she and her best friend, Jane, an academic she met in law school, are survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Vivian’s solidarity with her clients, we soon discover, goes beyond empathy she identifies with them. Their job was to keep people in Vivian’s job was to get them out.” She watches one doctor sneer as he describes his patients during a court hearing, arguing that their struggles with mental health make most of them “wholly unassimilable” into society. The nurses at the facility are her “adversaries. Her experiences lead her to believe it behooves the state to keep people unwell, that institutions are in fact at odds with the integrity of the individual.
Vivian is a lawyer living in New York in her work as a legal advocate, she helps patients at a mental-health facility navigate the court system. Johnson’s debut novel, introduces its heroine as a seemingly capable, self-assured 30-something with a laser-focused sense of justice.
0 kommentar(er)
