THE ANNIVERSARY, by Stephanie Bishop
In love, in art, in crime, what is done intentionally and what is done unintentionally? This is the question at the core of Stephanie Bishop’s fourth novel, “The Anniversary.”
When we meet our narrator, J.B. Blackwood, a mixed-race Australian author, she has just learned she’s won a major literary prize for a still-unreleased semi-autobiographical novel. The news hasn’t been announced publicly and she has yet to tell her husband, Patrick, a white, British, indie-darling filmmaker 20 years her senior and her former college professor. It will be a nice surprise for him, she tells the reader, but after the international cruise she and Patrick have planned to celebrate their 14th anniversary and to get away from their troubles at home in England.
On the cruise, Patrick and J.B. fight, Patrick gets drunk, and then falls overboard during a storm. Afterward, authorities search for, and find, Patrick’s body; J.B. winds up giving a witness report to police officers in Japan; and she is feted onstage at the prize ceremony for her novel, all in the same week. The cause of the accident and the high-profile publicity for J.B.’s book in the wake of Patrick’s death form the plot of the story, but it’s J.B. herself, an unreliable narrator at once completely confessional and narratively coy, who is the major engine that drives it.
The first half of the novel is eventful and atmospheric. J.B. describes the circumstances of her life — a mother disappeared in her youth, an affair with her professor-now-husband and even his death — with what feels like an eerie calm. Yet this narration turns deliciously complex when the known facts are reshaped as J.B. returns to them with increasing honesty and nuance. In its latter half, “The Anniversary” grows into a feminist commentary on the nature of mysteries and marriages.
Bishop skillfully invokes and revises the “forbidden passion” trope of a relationship between an older teacher and a young ingénue. J.B. tells us that as a student, she climbed into a cab with Patrick both to avoid the rain after a seminar and to satisfy her girlish crush, a small choice that changed the rest of her life. “Maybe I wanted only to want,” she recalls, “but did not really know what it was, exactly, that I desired.” In a virtuosic move, Bishop allows her narrator to recall the early days of their relationship in a romantic way only briefly before revealing the grotesqueness of the power imbalance between the lovers.
The insights throughout the novel, especially the second half, are astute and affecting (“It was here that I discussed the structures of power which a woman’s art must wrestle with before it is permitted to flourish,” J.B. thinks of the author’s note she added at the end of her novel), but the reader might feel wearied by their volume. The meta-conversation in the book is smart — What does it mean to tell a true story? Who is responsible for what? — but it also swamps the action and leaves the novel a little unbalanced and unsatisfying.
Still, when we return to the action at hand, Bishop’s scenes are engaging and unsettling. As J.B. becomes a suspect in Patrick’s death, she returns to Australia for the first time since she got married. There she reunites with her sister and niece, and their moments of conflict are riveting. They have an uncanny, dreamlike quality, unfolding without J.B. quite being able to participate in them fully. Eventually, J.B. becomes disoriented about which parts of her life are memory and which parts are her own fictional creations; which parts were her choices and which were the outcomes of her passivity?
“The Anniversary” is similar to contemporary books like Meg Wolitzer’s “The Wife” and Liane Moriarty’s “Big Little Lies” in the ways it tackles gender and power, but it offers the pleasures of the Gothic novel too — houses and relationships full of secrets, and a narrator with an uncertain grasp on reality. When J.B. first explains her marriage, it seems that she is telling us a romantic tale, but as the details pile up, the story starts looking like something else entirely. J.B. is a very good narrator, but I suspect she is not recounting her saga for the reader — she’s telling it for herself.
“A lie told well should sound true,” Bishop writes. If so, “The Anniversary” is about the lies we tell ourselves when the traumatic facts of our lives become unbearable and we need to twist them into a story we can stomach.
CJ Hauser is a writer and a professor of creative writing at Colgate University. They are the author of “The Crane Wife: a Memoir in Essays” and the novel “Family of Origin.”
THE ANNIVERSARY | By Stephanie Bishop | 420 pp. | Black Cat | Paperback, $18