A sense of justice forms the conditions for literary pleasure. Suspense is ethics

You caught a glance between two people and thought it was a moment. He came on to her first or she to him; she liked his tie, or he reminded her of the football instructor she had that spring when she was nine, when there was so much pollen in the air that her eyes were red and swollen for months.

We prune desire in order to explain it, to others or to ourselves. We give events reasons so that they will release us. All things being equal, we would rather turn out the bedside lamp happily or in despair than in uncertainty, to the extent that we have a choice.

The novel tolerates ambiguity far better than human beings do. When I was writing mine I did not want to share its premise, though I appreciated the kindness of friends who asked. In saying it I would distort it. I have been advised many times to come up with “elevator pitches” for projects, and I have done so because it is the done thing, but I never believe in them, or in myself when I am saying them.

“It’s about a woman,” I would eventually say, “who has been in a relationship with an older man for a long time, and she’s bored. So she tells him she needs a break; they agree that they can both see other people, but she assumes that she will and he won’t. She goes to Greece, and while she’s there she realizes she misses him. But when she gets back, he’s fallen in love with someone else. And she’s devastated.”

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Here I would begin to fidget; devastated already seemed bad; there was something sentimental in it. “So she gets involved with” – sometimes I said tries to seduce, sometimes I said seduces, sometimes I said starts a relationship with, all of these were fine and none were right – “his nineteen-year-old son.” Sometimes I added as revenge, and then I was angry at myself, because I did not know if revenge was the word.

What about predation or predatory or abusive? What about incestuous? I did not know what to do with those, either. In my novel Cold New Climate, the relationship between Lydia and Caleb is in many ways mutual. In life, too, desire is always strange. We have no idea where our romances will take us, and it is common for a person’s choice of partner to appear to others idiotic or deranged.

And yet Caleb is a vulnerable 19, having been in and out of psychiatric care throughout his adolescence. Lydia is 18 years older than him. And for most of his life, he has known her as his de facto stepmother. Still, there is no actual familial relationship between Caleb and Lydia – at least, not one that we have a word for. There are reasons to be discomfited – and reasons to question these reasons.

I wondered, sometimes, if it would make a difference if the genders were reversed, if the novel were about a man who took as a lover his ex’s young adult daughter. I wondered if that difference would have mattered to me, and whether or not it should.

“Lolita has no moral in tow”, wrote Nabokov, and in a sense neither does Cold New Climate. This is not to say that it has no ethical concerns; they are paramount. But it does not drag behind itself a message that slows its motion in order to justify its endeavour, like a boat must tow a barge loaded with cargo so as to deliver the expected goods when at long last it pulls into port.

Fiction achieves its effect by showing human action and its consequences, and so awareness of harm is endemic to the progression of narrative. This is not an abstruse point: simply put, there is no thrill in reading if we do not care whether our characters are hurt or helped, wounded or delivered. Because the beauty of a book is not merely in its prose style but also in the emotions it elicits, the altruistic aspect of a novel is not contrary to its aesthetic impact. They are barely distinct. The resonance and propulsion of a book are possible because of the reader’s ethical compass, even – or especially – when characters do damage to others.

Imagine, if you can, thinking it is acceptable to murder elderly women, and see how far you get in Crime and Punishment, which will be for you a hyperbolic and nonsensical police procedural devoid of meaningful content. Lolita has often been criticised because it does not show the child’s perspective, but our fascination with Humbert is predicated on our care for her, not set in opposition to it; we want to know how someone could be so cruel and solipsistic, and we are revolted with ourselves because he charms us.

If we were not bothered by hebephilia, we would likely not enjoy over 300 beautifully written but rather aimless pages about a man and his partner engaged in a survey of mediocre American motels – and this is not to say that no reader is titillated, but that titillation is not necessarily separate from discomfort or introspection. A sense of justice forms the conditions for literary pleasure. Suspense is ethics.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as Joan Didion famously wrote. We tell ourselves stories about our stories, too. Didion is reflecting on the difficulty of constructing a storyline, and though she is considering the challenges of narrating her own life in this essay, I have the feeling her words offer something about fiction. “I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility,” she writes, “but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experiences as rather more electrical than ethical.”

A novel, if it keeps our attention, can change the sense with every scene and revise itself with every line. In my own book, I wanted an electric ethics: live, capable of jolting the reader, made up of juxtapositions and cross-wirings, constructed according to the story through which its force ran. I wanted it to assert itself most clearly in the gaps where sense broke down, where pain and shock are felt.

A hand slips under the hem of a skirt. A face breaks into laughter. A story is beginning, which means there will be consequences, to the good or to the bad. One would like to extract a net value from the narrative, a judgment that can be made about whatever is really happening, as if a hand under a skirt were not enough, as if hands and hems and other people’s faces were not so often in life the sites of intractable problems. What remains as story is not less significant for its embeddedness in narrative; what is fateful demands that we live it out, which is a good part of its tragedy. In writing my novel, I wanted to indulge my questions rather than my opinions. I wanted to trust in the reader, who knows damage and error, displacement and joy and regret, anticipation and need.

Isobel Wohl is a writer and visual artist from Brooklyn, NYC. For seven years she lived in London, where she studied for a PhD at the Royal College of Art. She is the author of a short story collection, Winter Strangers (Ma Bibliothèque, 2019). Cold New Climate is her debut novel and is the launch novel of Weatherglass Books.