The Coming Bad Days by Sarah Bernstein review – a study in unknowability

Over the last decade or so, literary fiction has often taken a particular shape on the page. Everything is folded into one neat justified column – memories, digressions, dialogue (never signalled with quotation marks). New paragraphs are scarce. Page breaks do the work chapter breaks used to. This has an effect on language and tone. There is usually a resulting flatness, a poised Jamesian distance from which everything unspools. The diction is lofty and purposeful. Disturbances or disruptions are embedded in this cool, calm delivery, underscoring their gravity while also maintaining distance. Conversations of a surprising intimacy prompt unexpected reflections. The narrators rarely have names; geographic location is often unspecified; plot is hazy. I am thinking of the novels of Tom McCarthy, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Sophie Mackintosh or more recently Amina Cain. Is this the new millennium’s answer to modernism?

Sarah Bernstein’s debut novel, The Coming Bad Days, belongs to this category and takes distance as its central concern, using the form of fiction to think about how we live with other people’s utter unknowability, their complete separateness. If characters lack names, it is because – well, what is a name? How limiting, how imprecise? (The enemy of millennial modernism is the latent imprecision of things we used to take for granted.)

The narrator is a lecturer at a university (unnamed, of course) in a mid-size city (also unnamed) who, having previously studied the poetry of the Maghreb, has found more success as a scholar of the poet Paul Celan. She is a solitary woman, keeping a studied distance from her own body as well as from other people. So it is something of a shock when, not long after she is hired, she begins receiving notes, short italicised quotes or koans. “A different recovery of the world is required of us,” observes one. “A something overtakes the mind. We do not hear it coming,” says another. And even: “I yam what I yam and that’s all.” The notes bring with them an air of violation – of someone having been in the narrator’s space.

She strikes up a friendship with Clara, the wife of her department chair (only she and Charlotte the bikini wax technician get a name). At one point, Clara leaves her husband and moves in with the narrator, then, just as unexpectedly, moves out again. Is Clara the sender of the notes? We never find out. She is a cipher, the source of occasional pronouncements that prompt much of the narrator’s reflections on the difficulty of connecting in an ethical, meaningful way. “Clara looked at me directly now: But how various the ways of looking away. I found it difficult to respond to this gnomic utterance, whose meaning I would not have been able to paraphrase even though I understood it completely.” As usual, the narrator finds herself unable to speak, wanting to be “open” but holding back. “I wanted to reach out. Like so many things it was impossible. We went on sitting in silence.”

The notes and the permeability of the narrator’s boundaries reinforce the ambient feeling of dread in the novel; two girls have gone missing, and every night helicopters circle overhead, searching for them. In time, people seem to forget about the girls, but the searches continue. “I began to wonder whether I had in fact invented this story of the girls as a way of explaining the constant presence in the skies of the whirring aircraft.”

It is unclear the degree to which there is really something sinister afoot – at one point the mayor declares a curfew on the city, but the narrator doesn’t know why – or whether it is mostly a reflection of the narrator’s own psychological state of emergency. Out for a walk with Clara, the narrator reports feeling “like a lamb flaunting herself under the eye of a butcher”, hearing “the church bells ringing out the hour, the same whisper […] doom, doom, doom. Doom of our white day.”

Bernstein turns the narrator’s constant feeling of impending doom into a meta-reflection on the novel itself: “What’s going to happen?” “What was going to happen?” is a constant refrain. “The truth is,” the narrator reflects, “that sometimes we just want the worst to happen.” When a bad thing, an invasive thing, happens to Clara, the narrator fears she has caused it through her unrelenting attempts to put things precisely, to control vulnerability by understanding it. I think, anyway, that this is how the narrator sees it: I can’t say for sure.

All of this “doom, doom, doom” sits uneasily with moments of what I guess you’d call levity, as when the narrator’s university mandates games of volleyball and personal therapy for members of staff, or at the weekly department lectures, after which colleagues “took turns decimating the speaker, undermining his or her argument and by extension his or her life’s work or else and indeed just as often casting aspersions on his or her personal life”.

There is a Cuskian severity to the way the narrator and Clara refuse straightforward exchanges; no one can say what they mean because who, after all, knows what they mean? But there is also something beautiful in the novel’s willingness to be in a space of ambiguity, its search for “[a] fragile consensus ... Something about refusal, about changing language, ordering anew, possibility. I groped for the thought.”

Much of this millennial modernism is about the difficulty of using language to pinpoint exactly how we’re feeling, or how we relate to one another. The purified form and the lofty voice circle around that thing we can’t put a name to, with no guarantee that we’ll get there; the reward is in the approach. The Coming Bad Days fine-tunes the reader into more sensitive ways of being in the world; it identifies the signals of truth emitted from that hard-to-locate source, the place where we understand everything we can’t admit to ourselves.

• The Coming Bad Days is published by Daunt (£9.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.