I haven’t read Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel, POND. Although many people have recommended it to me, they’ve been largely unable to describe it to me when asked. “It’s one of those novels you just have to read for yourself,” they might say. Now, after reading Bennett’s dazzling second novel, I know exactly what they mean.

CHECKOUT 19 is a stunningly crafted work that, at its heart, is about a lifelong relationship with books. On the surface, it participates in the recent autofiction movement, since many of the details of the (unnamed) narrator’s biography mirror Bennett’s own: raised in a working-class English family, attending a comprehensive high school, eventually moving to Ireland. But in many ways, the details of the protagonist’s outward life are the least important thing about this novel. It is deeply interior in its focus, concentrating as it does so heavily on the narrator’s development as a writer and, more importantly, as a reader.

"...a stunningly crafted work... In some ways, the book reads like a collection of short fiction, given that each chapter is written in a slightly different style and has a pleasingly cohesive focus and structure."

The narrator (whose voice shifts in various sections from first, to second, to third person) relates her experiences jotting down drawings, notes and stories as a young teen, returning to their fanciful or disturbing imagery later with different and perhaps more perceptive eyes. In the novel’s longest, most allusive section, the narrator references dozens of different works, sometimes identifying them by name or author, or merely by a quote or a plot point. She demonstrates how her own self-conception, not to mention her romantic relationships, are shaped by the books we read --- and by the assumptions we make based on others’ reading material, such as a love interest who exclusively reads biographies of so-called great men:

“I realised he really did want to believe in greatness and had no interest in reading a more critical or evenhanded assessment of this or that man’s life… [S]ometimes I suspected that he wasn’t telling me the full story, that he was glossing over the parts of this or that man’s life --- including his own --- that were not so great at all…”

As the above passage indicates, CHECKOUT 19 is invariably perceptive and frequently very funny, which makes parts of it (particularly a scene of sexual assault near the end) especially shocking. In some ways, the book reads like a collection of short fiction, given that each chapter is written in a slightly different style and has a pleasingly cohesive focus and structure. But it is, despite the absence of much in the way of an overarching plot, undeniably a novel. Themes, and even phrases, recur throughout the work in a way that further underscores its interiority and, at times, almost stream-of-consciousness style.

One of those recurring themes is the idea of “promise” --- a young person who exhibits early intelligence or talent, but, due to particulars of class or circumstance, fails to fully realize that potential. In one of the novel’s most striking sections, the narrator --- having imagined a whole life story for the Russian man she observes doing his grocery shopping while she sits, bored, at her cashier’s station --- is handed a copy of Nietzsche’s BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL by that same customer. It appears he acknowledges that her intelligence is perhaps being squandered in her daily work.

Readers recognizing kinship with other readers --- there are countless moments like that in CHECKOUT 19. I’m probably doing an imperfect job of describing it, but, as they say, this is just one of those novels you have to read for yourself.