The Discomfort of Evening

on child characters and genre distinctions

What follows is another post inspired by recent reading as I explore hesitations and questions I have about my own manuscript. It’s a companion piece of sorts to what I wrote on Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre.

One of the big questions I’m grappling with is whether I’ve written a ‘young adult’ novel, or whether it’s just a book about a teenager.

I work as a bookseller, and genre breakdowns often feel like marketing categories rather than distinct indications of taste or reading capability. I’ve always read children’s and young adult books, and it’s my job to know that Max Porter can be pitched as ‘Alan Garner for Grownups’. Similarly, a reader of Pat Barker will also, probably, love books by David Almond. Distinctions such as ‘for children’ or ‘for adults’ seem, at best, arbitrary. At their worst, they’re limiting.

As I move towards querying agents and pitching my own book, I’m aware of the fact that its hybrid nature might make it a hard sell. So, I’ve been devouring books that offer some insight into the questions that I (and prospective agents) might have. I’ve been reading a lot of books about teenagers and children written with the adult literary fiction market in mind. I’ve also been reading books that centre the grittier sides of existence from within the parameters of a ‘young adult’ voice.

A mentor suggested I read Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. The English translation, penned with Michele Hutchison, won the International Booker Prize in 2020. This year, the pairing released the English translation of the followup My Heavenly Favourite.

Lauded and feared for their visceral and deliberately disturbing imageries, these books plough toxic relationships and maladaptive families to focus on the way in which small communities are torn apart by trauma. They carve through human lives with a razor-sharp poetic prose, where blank space does a lot of the talking. Equal parts mundane and phantasmagoric, they are truly powerful pieces of work.

The Discomfort of Evening is an outstanding book unlike anything I’ve previously read. I can’t say I loved it. I don’t think it’s that kind of book. What I can say, though, is that I needed to read it.

The story centres on twelve year old Jas in the wake of her brother’s death in an iceskating accident. I was thirteen when my brother died in a snow accident, so there was a degree of excavating my own experience with grief in the reading of this work.

It exposes the inability of a child to comprehend the enormity of feelings associated with traumatic loss and guilt. For Jas, grief blisters in a series of maladies that are prodded and poked by emotionally unavailable family members. We feel immense sympathy for her as she retreats into the safety of a red coat that becomes increasingly threadbare as her psychological state weakens. She secrets away to attic spaces and dark corners while contemplating what hides in the house’s basement. The answer is revealed in a finale that is both predictable and horribly shocking.

Jas and her siblings are left to their own devices in the tragic, but entirely believable, abandonment by their parents. The adults in their lives are succumbing to the grief that their restrictively religious lives could never have prepared them for. These adults dissolve as role models, infantilised by the realities of grief and economic destitution.

As the adults behave in childish ways, the younger characters adapt to become more grownup. They play out mature fantasties with toads, friends and farm equipment in some truly difficult passages. The immediacy of the first person narration from Jas’s perspective makes this situation both disturbing and heartbreaking.

This seesaw between the characters tore apart my preconceptions about what makes a book ‘for children’ or ‘for adults’ in a way that I haven’t yet fully understood.

It is, truly, a very difficult read that tightropes between discomfort, outrage and disgust to excavate how grief truly feels to those unable to comprehend its enormity. It made me think about how trauma-experienced people are often pushed to parent themselves in the absence of significant parental or care-providing figures in their lives.

Moreover, it made me think very deeply on what role themes of childhood and adulthood play in my own grief work. This, in itself, could be an unending dive into my own psychology and the experiences that have shaped it. I think that’s inevitable.

So, while The Discomfort of Evening hasn’t brought me closer to answering the manuscript question I set out at the start of this post, it’s helping me percolate them and I’m sure I will be thinking on it for a long time.

With love,
K x