Pond (Bennett)

Book Reviews
Pond is a slim novel, told in chapters of varying lengths that resemble short stories. There's little in the way of conventional plot. But Ms. Bennett has a voice that leans over the bar and plucks a button off your shirt. It delivers the sensations of Edna O'Brien's rural Irish world by way of Harold Pinter's clipped dictums…Pond is filled with short intellectual junkets into many topics. At other times it drifts, sensually, into chapters that resemble prose poems. You swim through this novel as you do through a lake in midsummer, pushing through both warm eddies and the occasional surprisingly chilly draft from below…As a writer, Ms. Bennett seems to know exactly what to take seriously. She puts us inside a complicated, teeming mind, and she doesn't dabble in forced epiphanies…Ms. Bennett's sensibility here feels like the tip of a deep iceberg, and I'll be in line to read whatever she publishes next. Her witty misanthropy is here to ward off mental scurvy.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


Pond, a sharp, funny and eccentric debut from Claire-Louise Bennett, is one of those books so odd and vivid that they make your own life feel strangely remote…the book's preoccupation with a kind of studied ridding oneself of the superego/organized social self that comes with being an adult works on you, slowly, making you question why so many of our everyday experiences go undescribed…. More than anything this book reminded me of the kind of old-fashioned British children's books I read growing up—books steeped in contrarianism and magic, delicious scones and inviting ponds, otherworldly yet bracingly real. Somehow, Bennett has written a fantasy novel for grown-ups that is a kind of extended case for living an existence that threatens to slip out of time…. Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. In the United States, we love the maximalist work, the sprawling Great American Novel. But Pond reminds us that small things have great depths. Unlike the pond the narrator lives beside within its pages, Bennett's Pond is anything but shallow.
Mehgan O'Rourke - New York Times Book Review


[A] smart, funny, elliptical debut…. Reminiscent of Joyce and Beckett in its unmistakably Irish blend of earthy wit and existential unease. Yet Bennett does much more than emulate literary forebears. Pond expressed her unique sensibility in deceptively simply, delightfully unsettled prose. We’ll be hearing more from this formidably gifted young writer.
Boston Globe


[Pond] contains no story, no action and...one describable character and is defined as much by these absences as by the material that remains. What’s left on the page are the gleanings of a “mind in motion,” to borrow Ms. Bennett’s phrase—reflections on everyday objects, philosophical digressions, daydreams and stirred-up memories and associations.... The book is reminiscent of a country diary, with entries that dwell on the narrator’s breakfast routine or her vegetable garden.... Hers is a mind in attentive communion with itself, building baroque and beautiful cloud castles of thought to distract from the storms of the real.
Wall Street Journal


An elegant and intoxicating debut novel…rich with strange, sensuous and exhilarating moods and textures…we are captivated by the narrator’s sharply illuminated interior reality and her lyrical depictions of the nature about her. Boldly defying convention, Pond is an exceptional debut with beautiful hidden depths.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune


A fascinating and utterly immersive reading experience that speaks volumes about the author’s creative process and delivers insights in droves...compulsively readable and wacky…. [Bennett has] diffused our often confusing and chaotic world into something more manageable, yet all the while making itty-bitty molehills into mountains
San Francisco Chronicle


(Starred review.) [F]ascinating.... Never do we glean [the narrator's] name, or occupation, or appearance. She is a physical blank slate, there for the reader's imagination to round out. Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and undeniably wonderful.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Innovative and elegant...In her celebration of minutiae, Bennett recreates the experience of a believable, uniquely captivating persona.  Pond deserves to be discovered and dived into, so thoroughly does Bennett submerge readers into her meticulously dazzling world.
Booklist


Short as it is, this is a demanding read: with its sharp, winding sentences, it's not a book that washes over you but a book that you work for. But the attention pays off: quietly striking, Bennett's debut lingers long after the last page. Strange and lyrical with an acute sense of humor.
Kirkus Reviews