In her obituary for Joan Didion, Zadie Smith writes how the late US writer’s famous line – “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” – is often misread as a personal credo. It’s our ingrained nature to trace a “narrative line upon disparate images”, as Didion put it, our need for coherence among chaos. The narratives we tell ourselves don’t describe meaning; they are meaning. The risk, as Jacinta Halloran notes in her perceptive fourth novel, Resistance, is that we succumb to certain tales over others, while “other stories slip past us like shadows”.
Resistance centres on Nina, a family therapist whose new clients, the Agostino family – husband Claude, wife Lisa and their two young children, Poppy and Theo – have been court-mandated to attend sessions with her. Halloran slowly siphons details of their alleged wrongdoing, though we’re told early that a seismic event drove the family to uproot, steal a car and disappear into the heart of the Australian desert. Nina’s job, beyond gaining their trust, is to ascertain whether the children are safe under their parents’ guardianship. The Agostino family, however, are hesitant to reveal their secrets.
