Ryan Allen

Sophie McCreesh, Once More, With Feeling.

Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2021. $25.00.

Once More, With Feeling begins in Jane's small apartment. On the floor are “the plastic wrappers of the toothbrushes Richard keeps buying because they break up almost every day,” and furniture she found on the street. Richard is her rather unloving lover, a distant and slightly older man. She wonders if she only stays with him because their relationship “is a useful tool in her subconscious quest for isolation.”
The novel follows Jane in a measured present tense and close third-person narration. McCreesh presides over her slight sentences with the bedside manner of a mortician. She’s funny without jokes (“It’s us!” Jane exclaims to Richard as she reads Crash, J.G. Ballard’s duet of sex and death, just happy to feel seen). Grim lines like “Her hangovers equate everyday living to fighting” are not unlike Mary Gaitskill or Leonard Michaels, stylists of the first order with an invisible hand.
As the book begins, she’s about to start art school and is drinking all of the time–at work, in cabs, before class, before flights, and on and on. No more than a few pages go by without her reaching into her purse for a mickey or flask. She hopes that her mounting depression will subside when she’s busy with school, but is also weary of “the sort of value people place on their own productivity.”
As for her productivity, her art, and her ideas of it, are mostly bad (she wants to paint Amy Winehouse portraits for a school project). Such a cringe-worthy art practice is refreshing, though. In the era of the künstlerroman, the coming-of-age artist novel, characters further advance their writing careers with every single page and the only people, if anyone at all, who are in doubt of their own creative talents are the protagonists themselves. Characters are bad at romance and good at art, more less. McCreesh goes a step further and makes her art-school protagonist pretty bad at both–and how realistic it is. Few writers these days dare to make characters pitiful–they’d rather subject them to pitiable horrors. Call the novel a thwarted künstlerroman, or just call it something more like life. Think of the frustrated artists Don Birnam in Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend and Geoffrey Firmin in Under The Volcano–men whose talents, if they have any, are untested and unrealized. Their stories end as they began or worse.
Most of the time Jane is alone. The surgical bluntness of McCreesh’s prose only heightens the loneliness to which we are distant voyeurs. Though she goes out sometimes, she listens to club music at home. Instead of visiting galleries, she looks at Egon Shiele paintings on her computer. Though she can drink at bars, she just as often drinks in secret.
Where did things go wrong for Jane? We don’t know. Intermittent flashbacks to fighting parents and debacles with peers in adolescence appear throughout the story, but they offer little in the way of a real Rosebud moment, as if McCreesh intends to subvert the conventions of the addict novel by denying readers, or Jane, that a-ha! moment.
There are few people in Jane’s life, and none of them are great. Other than Richard there is Kitty, a former high school acquaintance who only knew Jane as “the Crying Girl” and who now works with her at a restaurant. Kitty, once a not-here-to-make-friends rowdy girl, is now de-fanged and declawed by the real world. They bond over mutual distaste for their server jobs at the same restaurant and a love for doing cocaine before going to museums. Their relationship has a tenuousness that Jane considers “flirtatious” and “whimsical” as if trying to compensate for the fact that it might not be a great friendship. Kitty is all she has, though. “[Jane] just thinks it’s easier to try and save this friendship than to try and make a new friend.”
There is also Anna, her long-time unofficial therapist, now de-licensed. She has “the calculated, hungry look of an apex predator” and rips off patients as a fake psychic, wowing them not with clairvoyance but the terminology of her former profession.
A decommissioned therapist as a confidant, a bad friend, and an unloving man for a lover. No wonder drink, drinks, and drinking appear 80 times over the novel’s 200-odd pages. The tragedy for Jane is that “alcoholic”, however, only appears once. Once More, With Feeling is not structured as many other novels of addiction with epiphanies, the catalog of first sips, first blackouts, the bottoming out, the redemptive arc and a headlong race towards conclusion. It is something darker but freighted with artfulness. Where could the psychological novel go if it did not have a bent for melancholy?
When considering themes and protagonists, McCreesh is in league with Ottessa Moshfegh, the only woman writer people (book-jacket designer included) seem to know about. But where My Year of Rest and Relaxation ends with perhaps one of the more surprisingly bathetic endings of recent memory, McCreesh evades sentimentality to the very end.

RYAN DAVID ALLEN

lives in rural Nova Scotia with his wife and dog. He was a nominee for two 2020 National Magazine Awards and has been working on a book for a long, long time.