Notice

Though this book is not for the weak hearted or the virgin eared it is one of the most profound reads available. Heather Lewis really probes the human psyche to bring the motivation of her main character into view. She displays incredible astuteness in the maze of human sexuality and emotions. With a level of suspense that you find overwhelming as you unravel the plot. My favorite excerpt: "I'd promised myself. My life may have looked haphazzard and I suppose a lot of it was, but I'd kept this one piece very well ordered....Had tried to make it just about sex.....until the feelings themselves overlapped and tangeld up, impossible to distinguish, or stop, or recover from. These were the feelings that had made it necessary to stop feeling in the first place- to stop all of them. Or at least dull them, blunt them. Find so many ways around them, to never allow them. To keep myself especially far from love, and even farther from being loved because, of the whole lot of them, these were the only two that could actually kill you."

Instead of giving a play-by-play of "Notice," I'll just point out a few reasons why "Notice" is superior to other books that address similar topics. Like...say..."Push." I think the main thing that made this story so difficult and effective for me was the narrator's detached and unaffected (?) presentation. There's something about the fact that she all along goes unnamed and we never get many details about her parents' special brand of terrible (the terrible that lands her where we find her at the novel's open) that creates in the reader a sort of desperate longing to know and protect her. Then too, there's something in the way the unnamed narrator presents her horrific story. Even when she seems to get that what's happening to her is terrible, she never seems to get that what's happening to her is terrible. She distrusts, but then she ultimately reaches out and tries. And when she's hurt (no, brutalized) she tends to remain rather matter-of-fact. (And like many of the brutalized, she seems never to judge her brutalizers too harshly). I'm not sure how a character can be dry and matter-of-fact while at the same time expressing hurt beyond that which is commonly experienced, but this character manages to do it. And that makes the reader cry repeatedly. This is a horrific and brutal topic. And Lewis handles it masterfully. I don't usually get all mushy and emotional over pain on top of hurt on top of pain on top of hurt. But I got all mushy and emotional over "Notice." And that says something about the skill with which this story is told.

This was actually the second of three books that Heather Lewis wrote, as I understand it. This one was published last, and posthumously. After reading the book, it's no surprise that the author died at her own hand. This book is hard to read. It was hard to read the actual narrative, but that was almost cursory and not nearly as interesting as her ability to write from the perspective of her character. This is the best account of an internal struggle with dissociation I have read. Her style is so straightforward. I finished the book in a day and haven't been able to get it out of my mind since. It's gorgeous.