Should you dread wandering into the darker areas of your home for fear of encountering a nest of decomposing mice, spare a thought for Dolores, the narrator of Sarah Crossan’s latest novel, who, in the opening pages, opens a bag in her garage to discover “a woman with long, smooth limbs ... her hair disarranged, her lips fleshy, her eyes open”.
It’s not an ideal find, particularly as it’s been stashed there by her husband David, but thankfully it’s not a dead body. It’s a plastic sex doll named Zoey. Which, relatively speaking, is probably better.
Crossan doesn’t play any of this for laughs. Instead, Zoey becomes the catalyst that forces Dolores to confront experiences that have also been hidden from view, secreted in the furthest distances of her mind.
Angered but also intrigued by David’s intimacy with an object made primarily from latex and electrical chips, Dolores admits to owning a toy of her own although the battery has run down and she can’t find the charger. It’s a throwaway line but one that tells the reader a lot about her relationship with her own body.
Simultaneously, she finds herself drawn to one of her students, Oliver. Ironically, she’s trying to tear him away from the rumours of a liaison with a young woman teacher. No matter how often the reader suspects that something untoward is going to take place, Crossan subverts our expectations, leaving us instead to decipher what he, a quiet and studious boy, is adding to her life.
Over a 12-year career, Crossan has proved herself to be a singular writer with her own style and convictions. Writing for both adult and young adult audiences she has the rare gift of being equally skilled in both. Her use of language, its placement upon the page, an inventive hybrid of prose and poetry, is her defining trait but she eschews this device here, sticking to a more traditional narrative. Still, there’s room for idiosyncrasy and few pages pass without brief asides that might seem distant to the plot but, on consideration, offer deep insight into the loneliness that can affect us all and that have, perhaps without her realising, affected Dolores.
When confronted, for example, David is so embarrassed that he claims he’d “rather split up than have to talk about it”, leaving her to work through her feelings alone, which is what leads her back to memories of her early life. Her family are presented as rather dreary and harmless but Crossan is incapable of creating characters that either of these things, so when the surprises come, and their resolutions, they are as shocking as they are moving.
There’s an old saying that if you want unqualified loyalty and unconditional love, get a dog. That might have been true for centuries but, in 2024, it’s easy to see the allure of a doll that, for the most part, replicates the human experience while offering none of the trauma associated with connection to our fellow beings. Zoey recalls the inanimate creations in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, Brian Aldiss’s Supertoys Last All Summer Long, as well as the films Lars and the Real Girl and I’m Your Man, forcing us to question why we find it easier to relate to anything connected to wifi than to each other.
It’s in the small moments, however, where the greatest insights into Dolores’s character are revealed. Recalling a moment a few years into their marriage when David begged her to talk to him during sex, the best that she can manage is “Shh ... please” which, granted, is conversation but probably not what he was hoping for. Moving out of the marital home, he tells her that “If I told you what it’s like to be in love with you, it would hurt you to hear it,” she protests that he’s never told her this before. His response – “I tried. For years. For ever” – rings true.
Dolores’s decision to reanimate Zoey initiates a strange relationship between the pair. Asking Zoey to keep her safe, the doll responds with, “I’ll do what I can. And please do the same for me.” This isn’t a statement of growing affection, it’s simply an algorithm responding to a cry of despair.
Discussing this thought-provoking novel with a writer friend who also had a chance to read it before publication, my phone pinged with, “It remained with me; how do we write about trauma?” A good answer to this question would be, ask Sarah Crossan.
