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.
Running parallel to her sessions with the Agostinos, Nina herself becomes a client of a therapist named Erin, who serves as a supervisor to the case. As Nina relays her ongoing progress with the family, Erin probes into other shadowy areas of Nina’s life, such as the recent death of her brother and a turbulent childhood marred by her father’s abandonment of his family. There are stories within stories here, particularly those of women among men, and though these two psychology sessions constitute the bulk of Resistance, they also entangle with the lives and surprises of several other characters. Each narrative is a taut thread, written with a tempered restraint and woven dexterously into a tapestry of family, memory and identity.
Resistance is a meditation on what influences the stories we identify with, willingly or not, and the impact family can have on the myriad roles we come to inhabit. “Every day we bear witness to the haunting of the present generation by the deeds of generations past,” Nina reflects, and indeed, the sheer unknowability of families, their cavernous depths, is a central preoccupation of Halloran’s. It’s a renewed evocation of that tired Philip Larkin poem, a poignant interleaving of the innumerable familial shapes and scars that can exist – and the all-encompassing mythmaking they can engender.
Beyond the individual, Halloran shrewdly extends this subject matter into the stories constituting our collective past, a malleable history we selectively construct. Echoes of Australia’s genocidal treatment of Indigenous peoples resound through Resistance, as do the reverberations of its psychic damage to the settler consciousness. It is one of the novel’s more engaging and deftly rendered ideas: an extension of individual shame into a “collective darkness” – one colonial descendants harbour as perpetrators of an irreparable trauma against the land and its original inhabitants. It’s a story white Australia struggles to tell, preferring to substitute in other, more obfuscating histories. But as Lisa Agostino notes, “Shame and despair have a way of infiltrating generations.”
In its marketing, Resistance has been likened to British author Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. The similarity is largely in the structure of Halloran’s Nina, like Cusk’s Faye, lending herself as a sieve through which all other characters’ stories, thoughts and reflections trickle through to the reader. The novel, essentially a continuous patchwork of dialogue, is largely plotless, yet the author’s delicate, restrained unravelling of information imbues Resistance with a compelling suspense. Cusk once said she doesn’t much believe in character and Halloran doesn’t seem to, either – at least not in traditional terms. Much like life, the meaningful gristle emerges from intersecting stories; via the people she encounters, Halloran’s Nina is rendered immersive and rich.
In psychology, the term “resistance” refers to a patient’s hesitance or incapacity to engage with therapy, of being unable to meaningfully engage in the nuances – the “shadows overlaying shadows” – of one’s own narrative. Throughout this artfully rendered novel, Halloran interrogates the other stories we may struggle at times to contend with, or even understand. It’s a compelling insight into the human condition and on the indelible marks that can be impressed upon us by those closest.
Resistance by Jacinta Halloran is published by Text ($32.99).
