It was part of the mission of Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) to explain the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky – to explain, that is, why Dostoyevsky’s novels, with their endless side-trails of backstory, do not really resemble most of the novels published in the late 19th century. Dostoyevsky’s contemporaries – Arnold Bennett, Henry James – were forever complaining that novels such as The Idiot and The Possessed were shapeless, rambling, inchoate. Henry James memorably described The Idiot as a “fluid pudding”.
For Bakhtin, these criticisms missed the point. Dostoyevsky, Bakhtin said, did not belong to the “monologic” traditions of western thought and western fiction. He did not, in other words, conceive of a novel as the utterance of a single (if perhaps concealed or disavowed) authoritative voice. Instead, Dostoyevsky’s assumptions were “dialogic”. A novel by Dostoyevsky, according to Bakhtin, offers “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices.” Truth, in Dostoyevsky’s novels, is distributed, decentralised. This is the secret of their shapelessness.
Wendy Erskine’s sparklingly polyphonic debut novel, The Benefactors, is built on a similar insight. It is about many things – among them, the distributed nature of truth. The setting is contemporary Belfast and its hinterlands. There is no single protagonist. Certain characters receive the lavish attentions of a third-person free indirect style. Some voices – narrating short sections in the first person, scattered throughout – go unnamed. Traditional novelistic structure is eschewed. What a Hollywood screenwriter would call the “inciting incident” doesn’t occur until halfway through the book. Erskine never gives you the tiniest hint that one particular point of view, one particular character, might be preferred, might be central.
“The benefactors”: in the most immediate sense the title refers to an OnlyFans-style website, “Bennyz,” short for benefactors, on which young women do online sex work for men who send them money. Erskine’s finely tuned ear for language, and for its contemporary modes of evasion and concealment, allows her to ventriloquise the jargon in which this seedy operation cloaks its inequalities: “Tertiary factor is access to exclusive content, dictated by the beneficiary.”
On Bennyz, the men are the “benefactors”, though really, of course, we understand that it is they who are the beneficiaries – of patriarchy, one of the novel’s deep subjects. Misty, the teenage girl who ends up an unwilling, and often unwitting, link between all the book’s separate characters and voices, has a Bennyz account. This is held against her when, in the novel’s central event, she is raped by three young men, one of them the son of wealthy parents, two of them the sons of extremely wealthy parents.
Summarised like this, The Benefactors might sound like one of those ripped-from-the-headlines, state-of-the-young-people, how-would-you-feel-if-this-happened-to-you sort of novels that publishers try to sell to book clubs – the sort of novel that is supposed to provoke a meaningful discussion about “issues”. (Side-note: a good novel is itself a meaningful discussion of “issues”, aka the varieties of human experience.) But the effect of Erskine’s polyphonic method is to undermine op-ed simplicities, to insist on complexity. As one of her anonymous voices puts it, “no one should presume anything at any point about anybody”. The Benefactors is anti-presumption; it is, as Bakhtin would say, dialogic.
Three characters get the lion’s share of Erskine’s remarkably empathetic attention. First is Frankie Levine, who grew up in care in England, worked as what is euphemistically called “a high-end escort” and is now married to a Belfast widower, Neil Levine; Neil is vastly rich because of an “early 1990s innovation in compression software”. Second is Bronagh Farrell, who is chief executive of a charity that helps what are euphemistically called “disadvantaged youth”. Third is Miriam Abdel Salam, whose husband, Kahlil, now dead, ran a successful restaurant-supply company.
These three women are the mothers of the three boys who rape Misty at a house party (in a scene that is evoked only indirectly, via dialogue, flashback, police reconstruction). Misty’s father, Boogie, is a taxi driver; he also receives some of Erskine’s lavish third-person scrutiny. In part, the novel is about how rich people mobilise to protect their class interests; in part, it is about how human connections of all kinds are mediated by class, and by the hypocritical ways in which we speak about it, even to ourselves.
Erskine has published two excellent books of short stories, Sweet Home, and Dance Move. The Benefactors is a kind of short-story writer’s novel. There is a sense in which it works by accreting a sequence of virtuoso short stories until critical novelistic mass is achieved. At points it’s maddeningly indirect; at other points, magnificently enigmatic, persuasive, fresh. It takes a good writer to mobilise such a range of voices, moods, perceptions. It takes a very good writer indeed to offer us characters who, like actual people, speak so beautifully for themselves.
Kevin Power is associate professor of English at Trinity College Dublin
