“Here we go, the same story heard over and over again, but in reverse. The girl goes from Hollywood to a small town.” Margot is young, almost famous, and lonely, a daughter of celebrity parents and grandparents who has been emotionally neglected. Her rock star father, Steve, is only attentive to her in public. Her mother, Rose, is “a big withholder”: she cares for Margot but she doesn’t know how to be with her. More often than not, Rose leaves Margot with her own mother, Josephine, a former dancer who pulls the family strings. As a girl, Margot cuts and electrocutes herself – craving attention, she hardly notices the fact that she experiences no physical pain.
Stephanie LaCava’s second novel opens as Margot is abandoned by a controlling boyfriend and quits New York for rural Montana. “Everyone wants to go to the big city. Why never the reverse?” Of course, escaping to the country is not quite as renegade as Margot seems to believe. She’s folded in on herself in a shrunken world, lost in that strange combination of hypersensitivity and callousness that miserable feelings can bring on. She replaces an overturned stone gently, to avoid harming the bugs beneath. But she wipes her bleeding nose on the bathroom mirror; the cleaner will remove the blood. She pays extraordinary attention to clothing and decor: a choker’s “tiny flickering gold bars”, a butter-coloured leather cushion. “I tried to think of something to take my mind off myself.”
In Montana she drifts around an isolated late-modernist mansion (perhaps the most desirable interior I’ve ever read), until an encounter with a former neurologist, Graves, leads to an abstruse diagnosis. Margot doesn’t complain about a bad cut on her leg, and Graves makes a startling inference. “You were born with an insensitivity to pain.”
It’s an elegant premise: to explore the suffering and disaffection of privileged girlhood, through the experiences of one who cannot feel pain. I Fear My Pain Interests You suggests that Margot’s invulnerability is precisely what makes her defenceless. She becomes a magnet for controlling and abusive men. The book is seeded with references to jazz music and to body-horror French arthouse film, and these frame LaCava’s attempt to do something transformative with violence and suffering.
But its problem, as a novel, is that it just doesn’t seem very interested in being a novel. LaCava is cultivating a narrative experience of emptiness. There are allusions to numbness, negation and detachment. Everything is performance or reproduction. Relationships are explicated before they arise (“In time, I would see that his was the pathology of disconnection”), or long after they have ended (“Her love for me was the same as her love for my father, which had been either all in or all out”), but they rarely come to life on the page. Action is often deferred, conditional or continuous – “She would glare at me three more times throughout the meal” – and conversation blank:
“You should have told me you don’t like pizza.”
“Were you gonna cook?”
“I was gonna order sushi.”
“Oh yes, that’s more like it.”
“You want to call?”
“Nah. It’s cool.”
The banality here is purposeful – it’s how Margot converses with her father – but the words themselves just don’t land. Try saying it aloud: Sushi? “Oh yes, that’s more like it.” Events, characters, and descriptions, all have that hollow feel.
The book is structured like a short story with an extension. Its first half is introductory: Margot picks semi-interestedly through scenes from her youth. Then there is some meandering. Margot leaves her apartment. She buys tobacco from a bodega. She asks the cashier where she might find a good coffee shop, and notices a blind black cat. The cashier says that he calls the cat Miles Davis. “Cool,” says Margot … and the chapter ends. Towards the end of the novel, two catastrophic events happen in quick succession.
Any of this could be interesting. The vacated characters and mannered dialogue; the rejection of current literary preferences for direct action, for proportionate structure, for a payoff for every setup – these things could be what makes this book distinct, if they were brought to a consistency or force that would invite attention. But LaCava doesn’t seem to want to make it hurt.
• I Fear My Pain Interests You by Stephanie LaCava is published by Verso (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
