The Disassociated Girl

When a novel begins with the mention of another novel, it takes on the effect of a touchstone. So is the case with Anna Quinn's The Night Child, which opens with a scene in which a high school English class discusses Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). While the two students who speak up disagree as to whether the book is any good—one calling it plotless and without conflict or action and the other insisting that "God, the action's in their heads, you cretin"—Nora, the teacher and protagonist of "The Night Child" praises the book because it, like the work of many "daring" writers, "veer off traditional plot trajectories."

The plot of The Night Child doesn't seem to be aiming at the type of unconventional trajectory Nora praises. She has a young daughter and a husband and a general static contentment that begins to break down the moment she begins seeing ghostlike images of a little girl she doesn't recognize. The recurring event disrupts her life and she begins seeing a therapist, who helps her understand that the little girl is a disassociated personality she created when she was six, at the moment of an event so traumatic, she effectively repressed it through most of her adult life.

This is where the structure of the novel merges with theme. The points of the plot are less action-oriented than they are the highlights and setbacks of Nora's recovery process. The novel doesn't draw heavily on long-withheld information (withheld, that is, from the reader) or misdirection or subverted expectations. In fact, all of our assumptions about various characters remain intact from beginning to end. Instead, the novel successfully dramatizes all aspects of Nora's recovery, from her finally uncovering her childhood trauma (a sexual abuse by a close family member), to her denial, shame, guilt, and acceptance. All of this begins with the disassociated girl, an embodiment of Nora's repressed consciousness. The girl is able to express the same feelings, thoughts, and suspicions that Nora would likely have expressed at her age, directly following the abuse, had she had the faculties to do so. In fact, the girl seems to signify a sort of interior arrested development, on Nora's part, and sheds light on many of the discontents of Nora's adult life.

One of those discontents is Nora's marriage, which, given the nature of Nora's past trauma, presents an interesting opportunity to trace the subtle effects on her intimate relationships. However, Nora's husband, Paul, is painted in broad strokes of bad color. He's emotionally unsupportive, hard to talk to, and may be having an affair. On top of this, the novel occasionally reaches to show some of the more distasteful aspects of Paul's character, such as when Nora's brother shows up for Christmas with his new boyfriend and we're told "Paul isn't happy about it. He still thinks being gay is a choice, a bad one." Paul's characterization often veers into caricature, and this exemplifies the drawback of a novelistic structure patterned on a traditional recovery process. At one point, Nora accuses him of a serious crime. For the other characters, as well as the reader, it's clear that this accusation is a misguided projection. However, this does present an opportunity to disrupt the narrative pattern and heighten a sense of ambiguity by taking a simplified character and perhaps pushing him up and over the fence of caricature. Instead, the novel handles the episode by cleanly matching the readers' expectations.

While the most glaring weakness of the book is its inattention to complicating its peripheral and secondary characters, the reader does get a pretty thorough picture of Nora. Each chapter of the novel is grounded with a particular date, sometimes with a particular time of day (such as the morning of, the night of), and these present moments are often interspersed with scenes taken directly from the past, scenes traumatic and important and which...