‘My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.’
Deborah Levy, Hot Milk
Hamish Hamilton, 224pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780241146545
reviewed by Sharlene Teo
Hot Milk, the title of Deborah Levy’s sixth book, evokes smothering maternity and the fraught, oftentimes messy dependencies between mothers and children that extend into adulthood. It is an uncomfortable and intriguing title, tantalisingly vague and a little ominous – much befitting of this hypnotic novel. In her previous works, including Beautiful Mutants (1989) and the Man Booker-shortlisted Swimming Home (2011), Levy interrogates the concepts of exile, identity, and the slipperiness and ambiguity inherent in relationships and gender roles. Like Swimming Home, Hot Milk takes place over one sweltering summer and features an inscrutable, predatory temptress as both catalyst and object of puzzlement and desire. However, Hot Milk is arguably Levy’s most accessible work to date, as it replaces the enigmatic, timeless energy of her previous novels and story collections with an urgency rooted in the recognisably contemporary economic climate after the 2008 financial crash.
Bigger questions of how we live and economic uncertainty loom over a fairly straightforward plotline driven by two central questions: Will Sofia, the 25-year-old protagonist, discover and reclaim her selfhood and identity? And is Rose, her hypochondriac, volatile mother, truly suffering from a mysterious chronic malady, or is it invented?
While the mother-daughter relationship between irascible Rose and the oftentimes frustratingly timid Sofia forms the story’s core, this is framed by broader themes of truth, lies and power dynamics. The interplay between women and men, doctors and patients, objects of desire and their desirers, is explored to woozy and sensual effect in a compelling narrative interspersed by vignettes told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator. It is in these episodic fragments that Levy’s distinctively lush style most clearly shines through, and where she demonstrates her terrific knack for spot-on similes: ‘love explodes near her like a war but she never admits she started it. She pretends she has no weapons but she likes the smoke.’
Rose and Sofia arrive in sunny Almeria from rainy London. Close by, the sea is swarming with treacherous medusa jellyfish, a threat that leaves Sofia’s body covered in blistering welts. She gets her wounds tended to by Juan, the ‘fully bearded’ student who mans the injury hut. But Sofia and her mother are not here for holiday romance. Instead, they have spent €25,000 of their savings in order for Rose to consult with the enigmatic Dr Gomez, who may or may not be a quack.
Questions of truth and veracity linger over the scorching Andalusian coastline. Is Dr Gomez a swindling fraud sadistically prescribing unhelpful acts to his patients? Is Rose truly ill, or is she a selfish hypochondriac who uses her phantom symptoms as a means of controlling and undermining her daughter? The answers to these questions could be both yes and no, and in a novel as poetic and dense with metaphor and psychotherapy as this, they can be said to hardly matter. The biggest victim of Rose’s vitriolic tantrums is Sofia. Their barbed entanglement of guilt-tripping and filial piety is explored to feverish effect. ‘My love for my other is like an axe,’ Sofia intones. ‘It cuts very deep.’
Levy is arguably one of the most original and astute writers working today. She has an inimitable knack for bringing out the chimerical and poetic in the everyday. Her writing is both languid and precise, droll and poetic. So whiskery langoustines are regarded as ‘professors of the ocean’, and ‘blue is my fear of failing and falling and feeling and blue is the August sky above us in Almeria.’ This is a novel carried by Levy’s hypnotic, transfixing language and incisive powers of observation, particularly with regards to body language and sensual detail. This applies especially to the mercurial, opaque Rose, whose occasional bouts of strength and physical agility help to give away her intentions.
Sofia, meanwhile, is passive and rather noncommittal, and comes alive the most when committing acts of mild transgression as instructed by Dr Gomez. A scene where she steals a Dorado from a fish market is wonderfully funny and tense. Sofia’s attraction to the unreadable, flirtatious Ingrid Bauer is beautifully articulated, by turns sensual, funny and bittersweet, though Ingrid herself is irritating and unconvincing in her vapid glamour and the rather trite tragic motivations behind her evasiveness. Ingrid’s boyfriend Matthew is similarly thinly drawn to the point of distraction. However, the other characters, such as Dr Gomez, his daughter, Nurse Sunshine, and Sofia’s absentee father, are both convincing and engaging.
Hot Milk is a propulsive, hypnotically well-written novel of identity with an off-kilter sense of the constantly shifting power balances between mothers and daughters and men and women. Sofia is a millennial protagonist ‘pulsating with shifting sexualities . . . sex on tanned legs in suede platform sandals . . . urban and educated and currently godless.’ Her mother, on the other hand, seethes with regret, resentment and elegant rage, her relationship with her own ageing and presumably failing body explored with perceptive panache: ‘What is her body supposed to want and who is it supposed to please and is it ugly or is it something else? She is waiting for withdrawal symptoms from the lack of the three pills that have been deleted from her list of medication. So far they have not arrived. Yet she continues to wait for them like a lover, nervous and excited.’ This tension between these characters is the life and backbone of this strange, intoxicating novel, which brims with sensuality, black humour and shrewd observations about who we are and how we live.
Bigger questions of how we live and economic uncertainty loom over a fairly straightforward plotline driven by two central questions: Will Sofia, the 25-year-old protagonist, discover and reclaim her selfhood and identity? And is Rose, her hypochondriac, volatile mother, truly suffering from a mysterious chronic malady, or is it invented?
While the mother-daughter relationship between irascible Rose and the oftentimes frustratingly timid Sofia forms the story’s core, this is framed by broader themes of truth, lies and power dynamics. The interplay between women and men, doctors and patients, objects of desire and their desirers, is explored to woozy and sensual effect in a compelling narrative interspersed by vignettes told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator. It is in these episodic fragments that Levy’s distinctively lush style most clearly shines through, and where she demonstrates her terrific knack for spot-on similes: ‘love explodes near her like a war but she never admits she started it. She pretends she has no weapons but she likes the smoke.’
Rose and Sofia arrive in sunny Almeria from rainy London. Close by, the sea is swarming with treacherous medusa jellyfish, a threat that leaves Sofia’s body covered in blistering welts. She gets her wounds tended to by Juan, the ‘fully bearded’ student who mans the injury hut. But Sofia and her mother are not here for holiday romance. Instead, they have spent €25,000 of their savings in order for Rose to consult with the enigmatic Dr Gomez, who may or may not be a quack.
Questions of truth and veracity linger over the scorching Andalusian coastline. Is Dr Gomez a swindling fraud sadistically prescribing unhelpful acts to his patients? Is Rose truly ill, or is she a selfish hypochondriac who uses her phantom symptoms as a means of controlling and undermining her daughter? The answers to these questions could be both yes and no, and in a novel as poetic and dense with metaphor and psychotherapy as this, they can be said to hardly matter. The biggest victim of Rose’s vitriolic tantrums is Sofia. Their barbed entanglement of guilt-tripping and filial piety is explored to feverish effect. ‘My love for my other is like an axe,’ Sofia intones. ‘It cuts very deep.’
Levy is arguably one of the most original and astute writers working today. She has an inimitable knack for bringing out the chimerical and poetic in the everyday. Her writing is both languid and precise, droll and poetic. So whiskery langoustines are regarded as ‘professors of the ocean’, and ‘blue is my fear of failing and falling and feeling and blue is the August sky above us in Almeria.’ This is a novel carried by Levy’s hypnotic, transfixing language and incisive powers of observation, particularly with regards to body language and sensual detail. This applies especially to the mercurial, opaque Rose, whose occasional bouts of strength and physical agility help to give away her intentions.
Sofia, meanwhile, is passive and rather noncommittal, and comes alive the most when committing acts of mild transgression as instructed by Dr Gomez. A scene where she steals a Dorado from a fish market is wonderfully funny and tense. Sofia’s attraction to the unreadable, flirtatious Ingrid Bauer is beautifully articulated, by turns sensual, funny and bittersweet, though Ingrid herself is irritating and unconvincing in her vapid glamour and the rather trite tragic motivations behind her evasiveness. Ingrid’s boyfriend Matthew is similarly thinly drawn to the point of distraction. However, the other characters, such as Dr Gomez, his daughter, Nurse Sunshine, and Sofia’s absentee father, are both convincing and engaging.
Hot Milk is a propulsive, hypnotically well-written novel of identity with an off-kilter sense of the constantly shifting power balances between mothers and daughters and men and women. Sofia is a millennial protagonist ‘pulsating with shifting sexualities . . . sex on tanned legs in suede platform sandals . . . urban and educated and currently godless.’ Her mother, on the other hand, seethes with regret, resentment and elegant rage, her relationship with her own ageing and presumably failing body explored with perceptive panache: ‘What is her body supposed to want and who is it supposed to please and is it ugly or is it something else? She is waiting for withdrawal symptoms from the lack of the three pills that have been deleted from her list of medication. So far they have not arrived. Yet she continues to wait for them like a lover, nervous and excited.’ This tension between these characters is the life and backbone of this strange, intoxicating novel, which brims with sensuality, black humour and shrewd observations about who we are and how we live.