Pond

Starred review from May 2, 2016
Bennett's debut is a fascinating slim volume that eschews traditional narrative conventions to offer 20 mostly linked sectionsâit's impossible to classify them strictly as chapters or storiesânarrated by a nameless woman living in a small cottage in rural Ireland. The sections vary in length, with some as short as a few sentences, and each offers the reader insight into the rather quiet life of Bennett's narrator. Instead of telling straightforward stories, she wanders in a stream of consciousness manner from one ordeal to the next: lamenting the broken knobs on her kitchen's mini-stove leads to an explanation of a novel about the last woman on Earth; deliberating over the best breakfast meals digresses into a story about gardening. The reader lives in the narrator's head, learning tangentially through her words about her failed attempt at a doctorate, her romantic life, and her unwavering fear of strangers. Yet, despite these revelations, the empty spaces of the narrator's life, left for the reader to fill in, are what make the book captivating. Never do we glean her name, or occupation, or appearance. She is a physical blank slate, there for the reader's imagination to round out. Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and undeniably wonderful.

May 1, 2016
First published in Ireland, Bennett's meditative debut--rigorous, poetic, and often very funny--captures the rich inner life of a young woman living a mostly solitary existence in a remote coastal town. An interior portrait in 20 fragments--some short-story length, others just a few sentences--this collection abandons conventional notions of plot altogether. Nothing much "happens" here; there is essentially no "action"--at least, not by any traditional definition of the term. Instead, Bennett presents a series of exquisitely detailed, deeply subjective, frequently hilarious monologues on the business of being alive. Despite her constant presence, we know very few biographical facts about our nameless heroine. But we see the way her mind works, and we get to know her--deeply, even intimately--through her observations. In "Morning, Noon & Night," she recounts bits and pieces of a past romance ("We didn't get along very well but this had no bearing whatsoever on our sexual rapport which was impervious and persuasive and made every other dwindling aspect of our relationship quite irrelevant for some time"); in "Control Knobs," she chronicles--among many, many other, less tangible things--her quest to get the broken knob on her "decrepit cooking device" fixed. "Stir-fry" is just two bare sentences. "I just threw my dinner in the bin. I knew as I was making it I was going to do that, so I put in it all the things I never want to see again." It feels both crass and inaccurate to reduce any chapter to a single "about"; each fragment is simultaneously hyperspecific and sweeping. Short as it is, this is a demanding read: with its sharp, winding sentences, it's not a book that washes over you but a book that you work for. But the attention pays off: quietly striking, Bennett's debut lingers long after the last page. Strange and lyrical with an acute sense of humor.

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Starred review from July 1, 2016
For this debut collection of stories, first published by a tiny press in Ireland before gaining international recognition, Bennett has received favorable comparisons to Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and Samuel Beckett, among others. The stories, which range from more than 20 pages to no more than a few sentences, share the same narrator, a nameless woman who lives alone in rural Ireland, although the exact location is never identified. While it carries obvious similarities to pond-inspired Walden, Thoreau's seminal reflections on solitude, Bennett's innovative and elegant prose is more interested in the interactions between the interiority of her narrator's character and the felt presence of the world around her. Whether she's wandering the coastal countryside or contemplating suicide and literature, the narrator inhabits a world that feels magical and dreamlike even as it is rooted in the exacting features and tactile reality of a real place: a seashell, a bowl of potato peelings, a blanket, embroidered cloth. In her celebration of such minutiae, Bennett re-creates the experience of a believable, uniquely captivating persona. Pond deserves to be discovered and dived into, so thoroughly does Bennett submerge readers into her meticulously dazzling world. For readers enamored of short stories and meditative nature writing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)