Jessica Au’s novel “Cold Enough for Snow” is perhaps most masterly in the way it evokes our dissociation from desire—our own and other people’s.
A mother and daughter meet in Japan for vacation. They take walks, ride trains, visit art galleries, eat in restaurants, and shop for gifts. This is just about all the surface action in “,” the slim and sly second novel by the Australian author Jessica Au. The daughter narrates in calm prose that evokes the sound of a rake carefully tracing a pattern in sand.
At times, Au seems to be encouraging this very approach, teaching us to read her book the same way the narrator reads her mother: by watching closely for clues about backstory, waiting for the moment when it finally reveals itself asstory. The narrator prides herself, above all, on being a keen observer of her surroundings. In the very first scene of the novel, she describes a sidewalk with almost scientific specificity.
Of course, it’s possible to perceive this warning without heeding it. All throughout the vacation in Japan, Au’s narrator keeps prodding her mother, in different ways, to open up. But the mother resists. No, she doesn’t want to try a nude public bath. No, she doesn’t have anything to say about how abstract art makes her feel. Being pressed on the subject seems to make her “panic, as if called to give an answer to a question she did not understand.
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