The Weak Spot
by Lucie Elven
Soft Skull, 2021
Review by Sean Hooks
Quirk to Spare: The Weak Spot by Lucie Elven
Lucie Elven’s debut The Weak Spot is an “it’s on you, dear reader” novel. It also serves as a litmus test for your tolerance of twee. The book begins with a whimsical Wes Anderson vibe that never fully dissipates, even as darker and more allegorical winds blow through over the course of its slim, white-space-heavy 161 pages. And its fable-like constitution will surely earn comparison to fairy tales, though not the grisly, spectral, or fully magical realist ones favored by her Brit forebears Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman, and Jeanette Winterson.
There is something new and different here, a piquant taste neither sweet nor sour. The author’s approach is terse, oblique, a Belle & Sebastian ballad in prose. It’s also aggressively quaint, even as it treads forward murmuring with insidious undertones. The Weak Spot’s nameless young female protagonist works at a pharmacy in a small, contemporary European village set into the side of a mountain, a minimalist-feminist spin on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Elven’s wordsmithing is evocative and fresh, and some will surely see her targets as aligned with buzz phrases like toxic masculinity, male privilege, rape culture, patriarchy, complicity, and gaslighting (all alluded to but never explicitly named, and the book better for it). The reader’s mileage with this tale will have more to do with their digestion of the author’s syntax. Elven imbues her book with an eccentric tone that is nineteenth-century as all get out and conflates this with content that circles around smart phones and Senokot prescriptions.
The narrator apprentices with the burg’s pharmacist, Dr. August Malone, a kindly oldster like something out of a John Irving novel (the character’s name plays with the notion of the “august” older male and the formalist withholding of Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies), one revealed to be ambitious and self-involved. He is initially described as “a large man of around fifty with an upper lip that dropped beautifully over his mouth. He looked unregulated and liable to weep yet also orderly, a wardrobe out of whose stuffed shelves coats and pillows would tumble if you opened the door without care.” If that description strikes you as lovely and lush, this is a book for you, if it rubs you as overwrought, take a pass. If you are intrigued by a work where the man who drives the town funicular is referred to as Mr. Funicular, a jolly and garrulous figure who keeps in his pocket “an animal figurine fashioned out of fabrics of different provenance,” come aboard for the ride into The Weak Spot’s fileted, fragmented, and filigreed fiefdom.
Our narrator’s quietude and shyness are alleviated by an Our Town-ish teacher, Helen Stole. “She never made me feel like she couldn’t understand me although she was of a different generation, or that I needed to speak up to be heard, although I was from another part of the country.” There are tenebrific paintings, statues of local saints, a spooky bar, the aforementioned funicular, and a kitsch-baiting array of characters named Elsa and Nellie and Annie Milk, all set in a world where people can send emails but still pore over physical maps. Whether or not it has enough clout to be trenchant is debatable. Some may find its compactness highly interpretable, fun, and re-readable, while others may see it as inconsequential, overly gnomic, and abstruse. Either way, it revels in its weird nooks and oddball crannies and doesn’t feel the need to overexplain its own strangeness.
As the novel continues, Malone makes a mayoral run and grows erratic. The reliability of the narrator and the roles of protagonist/antagonist get called into question in a way that is defamiliarizing enough to tickle one’s Viktor Shklovsky bone, while others may find it a jumping off point for a discussion of just how hard minimalism is to do well. Be it Agnes Martin and Donald Judd in the visual arts, Ray Carver and Ann Beattie in the short story, or Dirty Projectors and Travis in indie pop, the line between simple and simplistic is a tightrope that earns those artists acclaim because it’s so hard to make it all the way across.
Like many debuts, The Weak Spot doesn’t dash flawlessly over that gap, but it shows promise. In parts of the novella, Elven embraces aspects of another genre, the capital “M” mystery, even giving Hitchcock’s Spellbound a direct shoutout. Taking that leap into a fully-developed potboiler while toning down the playfulness may, for a certain type of reader, have proved preferable to the young Londoner’s highbrow articulations and ambiguity-prizing aesthetic. Some will surely itch for Elven to throw off the yolk of quaint-and-quirk and go full Sarah Waters, or even stride into Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie territory.
Genre concerns aside, however, I’ll reiterate that this is a novel that might split its readership. Is there wisdom and profundity or woo-woo new-agey-ness in the following? “I was feeling that my life would be short, relative to the trees that I passed that were two hundred years old or the buildings that were tired. This decorative stuff I didn’t take seriously would outlive me.” There are times where you may wish Elven spent more energy worldbuilding or giving her aphoristic prose additional buttresses so that it could support a fully novelistic context. I, for one, was frustrated when the protagonist and Elsa (a major supporting character) begin a potentially interesting discussion about whether Elsa is susceptible to going along with a crowd, but it doesn’t develop as drama. Same for the narrator observing that she tends to think of herself as better than she actually is, whereas Elsa always thinks of herself as worse. There are too many embers in this book that don’t provide the light and warmth of a fireplace in full flame, and I’d bet that it will be accused of both vagueness and vagary in some traditionalist quarters.
That said, new and intriguing characters continue to people theThe Weak Spot’s third act, and the descriptions and distillations are well-wrought throughout. The likable Annie Milk’s “new replacement arrived, young and boxy-hipped, with a few stern streaks of gray in his hair.” A better incarnation of a pedant is hard to find, and to render him so incisively isn’t a capability possessed by many first-time novelists. Near the end, there is an encounter at a crossroads where a character’s patois is described as “a thin cloth he held over what he meant, letting me see its shadow or its shape protruding. If I pulled at the veil, the mystery under the surface would poke out.” Keeping her gist hidden beneath the covers gives Elven’s novel/novella a giddiness, a funhouse fugue state that isn’t full-on cryptic, a withholder’s glee in not spelling it all out for you. Whether that’s your cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice in a small plastic vessel ordered from a lawless train station bar — the unnamed narrator’s drink of choice because “when I was younger and I woke up early, I couldn’t go back to sleep unless I had a glass of orange juice, and then I could feel drowsy again” — is up to you.