by D.W. White
April 19, 2022
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Best Laid Plans: Narrative Progression and Digression in Siobhan Phillips’ Benefit
FICTION REVIEW
Image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Benefit by Siobhan Phillips; Bellevue Literary Press; 320 pages; $17.99
A deceptively slippery question, in the analysis, discussion, and contemplation of a novel, can often be what’s it about. Any successful book, and many unsuccessful ones, will be layered affairs, with storylines, character arcs, thematic patterning, and narrative progressions developing simultaneously and in conjunction with each other. This depth and intricacy of construction can give a novel power and verisimilitude in portraying life—while challenging both creator and critic. In her debut novel, Benefit, Siobhan Phillips weaves a novel impressive in its willingness to change speed and stay unpredictable, even if the result is a work a touch less cogent than was perhaps called for in the original design.
Benefit follows Laura, an academic specializing in Henry James and fresh out of a job as an adjunct in English. When the book opens, she has just run into Mark, a former peer at the prestigious Weatherfield fellowship, a postgraduate salon de thé of sorts, a clearinghouse for scholars of all stripes through which they both had studied at Oxford years prior. Like all good protagonists, Laura is in something of a quandary. Her hyper-specialized field of study has not yielded up the lucrative fruits of remuneration, and she barely is able to scrape together enough money to move back in with her endlessly supportive mother. Her last weekend in her Boston apartment coincides with that of a Symposium on War where Mark, who segued from the Weatherfield to the Marines and then Iraq, is a presenter. From this chance encounter Laura begins reconnecting with her former fellow fellows, and Benefit unfolds.
Laura takes her time in getting to her story, making liberal and digressive use of the fictive past throughout a slithery opening chapter to setting up the fictive present action. It is time that Phillips wisely grants her, as Benefit is all the stronger from the establishment of its heroine’s voice, the strongest single element to be found in the work. When Mark, after the symposium, suggests coming to see Laura at her soon-to-be-ersatz apartment nearing midnight, Phillips takes the chance to showcase her movement skills:
“I think it’s too late,” I said.
A pause. “Yeah, you’re right.” “I mean—“ I almost reversed. “Some other time.” He was moving again; I heard traffic and his accelerated breath.
“Some other time.” And with no chance of Mark coming over I paused for a moment and remembered what it was like to work
at Oxford. I remembered the places and times of my
work, all the rooms and hours Mark and I never met.
Evenings at the college library, a space barely altered
for a century or five, full of priceless volumes rotting
through their bindings and leather chairs leaking grimy
puffs of stuffing.
Laura enjoys moving liberally between her days at Oxford and her current situation, and Phillips is comfortable and adept with the techniques required. As a result, both the foundation as a whole and Laura’s specific experience in the fellowship are given more and more attention as the present is interrupted by the past. A book that begins as a voice-driven examination of a protagonist at a crossroads gradually morphs into something else, in a manner that makes the intentionality behind the move somewhat difficult to pin down. When Laura is commissioned to write a history for the centennial of the Weatherfield foundation by another former colleague, Heather, her research begins to monopolize both protagonist and novel.
The prose remains sharp and inventive, at times employing a near-Cuskian sensibility (even, at times, adding an Outline-esq elision of the first-person voice), while at other times using word play and freely-associative memory to bounce around in time. Laura is a compelling, capable narrator, and Phillips’ willingness to play with linearity and narrative is both wise given her abilities and refreshing given the stark conventionality of current literature. However, on the larger levels of structure and plot, there is a slight lack of focus that becomes apparent as the foundation takes on more of a leading role.
After building towards a redemptive arc surrounding Laura—the tale of the drift less thirty-something academic that’s become rather en vogue of late—and her work for her fellowship foundation as a way of re-centering her life, Benefit drifts away from this and towards something more ephemeral and philosophical. Laura and the book begin to prioritize the sordid past of the Weatherfield foundation as an example of “toxic philanthropy” in the Gilded Age, and the fate of Florence, foundation founder Ennis Weatherfield’s wife. There is nothing wrong with such a story—it can be done well, and Phillips certainly has both the skills and the eye for the task. But she never quite seems to commit to what her book becomes, and there is a feeling running throughout that author and novel are at odds with each other.
As Laura becomes more involved in her research about the Weatherfield foundation, the imagined voice of Florence Weatherfield takes over for stretches at a time, and suddenly we find ourselves in something of a historical drama, a critique of a corporate tycoon from the turn of the century, an exercise in investigative journalism a century after the fact. The early tensions surrounding Laura’s career and life seem to have at some point taken their leave—not in a narrative resolution, or even in a clearly deliberate authorial diversion, but in a gradual melting away, as if they were mere scaffolding supporting the novel’s first hundred-odd pages. The Weatherfield foundation and its unsavory past take on an ever-increasing role, and while that story may be a perfectly compelling one, the reader can be forgiven for wondering just where that direct, sharp-tongued protagonist with easy temporal movement and a clear character arc might’ve run off to. Laura’s wit and engaging narrative tone are on display when she visits another Weatherfield friend, Greta, herself giving a bath to her young daughter:
“You ready to get in, chicklet?” she asked. “Is it time for bubbles?”
It was time for bubbles. Greta sat on the edge of the tub. The room began to warm into fruity humidity.
I hovered in the doorway, leaning. I could see a curl forming at Greta’s forehead, against her pink temple. “But did you like being married, though?” she asked me, one eye on Veronica, who gave small plastic people boat rides through foam.
“Apart from the terrible guy you got. If that makes sense.”
“It does. He wasn’t terrible. I’m not sure.” Our trip to the courthouse felt daring and sensible, rebellious in
its romanticism and its practicality, both—weren’t we in love?
This type of blending of amusing scenic reprieve and charged emotional moment is on display across the book, and the element with which both protagonist and author are the most adept.
Benefit remains an enjoyable read and largely effective book, principally on account of Phillips’ command of her protagonist-narrator. Even if, in Laura’s world view, the characters feel slightly overdone in an attempt towards the type of hyperbolic colorization that a character-driven work admittedly needs—Heather’s complete self-possession, total genius, and incalculable wealth are more flotation device than narrative vessel—the reader remains allied with her. Laura’s sensibilities and the free reign Phillips gives her combine to render the cast of Weatherfield alums in full color.
The book is best, as here, in scene, mixing a good eye for humor and the occasional mechanical flourish with emotive dialogue. Passages such as this one make the retroactive case for keeping Benefit on its original track, and why the shift that marks the book’s second half is a moderate disappointment. Laura as a guide and heroine is more than engrossing enough to carry a novel on her own, and one wonders as to the type of work Benefit might have been had the promise of the opening chapters been sustained throughout. By infusing heroine with so completely realized a capacity for scholarly research and curiosity, Phillips lets her stray a bit from the fictive task at hand. In the final analysis, then, Benefit is about an exemplary protagonist who simply loses herself in a story.
©2022 West Trade Review
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
D.W. White is a graduate of the M.F.A. Creative Writing program at Otis College in Los Angeles and Stony Brook University's BookEnds Fellowship. Currently seeking representation for his first novel, he is the founding editor of L'Esprit Literary Review and Fiction Editor for West Trade Review, where he also contributes reviews and critical essays. His writing further appears in or is forthcoming from Florida Review, UnContemporary Review, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review among other publications.A Chicago ex-pat, he now lives in Long Beach, California, where he teaches writing and frequents the beach to hide from writer's block. He can be found on Twitter at @dwhitethewriter.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
