Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar

I was suddenly aware of his eyes in the portrait: you know how it is when you feel you're the focus of somebody's attention--you immediately glance up. There was no hint of embarrassment. Nor even of amusement. I wouldn't have wanted either. But was there--yes?--a look of somehow even greater attachment?

I felt that anyway he always watched over me and protectively followed my every move. Yet was there now something marginally more pronounced about the quality of his concern? Marginally more profound?

What is madness? The seniors in my fiction writing class love to write about it. Mostly, they use it as an excuse to have a character do or say anything without having to dwell on the question of motivation. Why does she stab him in the bodega? Well, she went insane. That's all there is to it. But mental illness isn't like that; it isn't the obliteration of the ego, replaced by quantum randomness. The mentally ill think and feel, and the things they think and feel are not so different than what anyone else feels, though exaggerated or unmediated by social context.

Wish Her Safe at Home is a dark farce about a woman on the road to insanity that understands how to present the interior version of what madness really looks like. I don't mean that it's particularly woke about mental illness; it's a lot closer to the Jane Eyre mode of grand Gothic madness than that, but that it presents a convincing narrative version of what it might be like to go insane and why, which is no easy feat.

At the beginning of the novel, Rachel Waring is a middle-aged woman living in London whose aunt leaves her a house in Bristol. Rachel, unsatisfied with her relative loneliness, the drudgery of her job and living with a roommate, jumps at the chance to reinvent herself in Bristol. Even before she moves, it's easy to see something unsettling about her personality: she spins elaborate fantasies about marrying the handsome pharmacist at the drugstore, and then gets disproportionately upset when she finds out he's married. We pick up through subtle context clues that her interlocutors are a little weirded out by her irreverence and optimism in a way she never picks up on. When the bank sends her a letter about the fact that her checking account as run out of money, she blithely ignores it.

In Bristol, Rachel's eccentricities become pathological. Her aunt's historic home, she's told, was once owned by an abolitionist ally of William Wilberforce named Horatio Gavin. She becomes obsessed with Gavin, buys a portrait of his likeness--the novel suggests it's a random likeness she's convinced herself is Gavin--and begins to write a novel about him. Soon, she's introducing him to house guests as her lover and husband.

What's so clever about Wish Her Safe at Home is the way that it keeps us firmly in Rachel's first person point-of-view, and never gives us any independent confirmation or denial that what she recounts is real. Obviously, the 18th-century Gavin has not materialized to sniff the flowers she weaves into her pubic hair (yowza), but what about the extended praise the vicar heaps on her singing voice? What about the handsome Roger, who, along with his wife Celia, asks Rachel to be the godmother to his newborn son? Is the couple trying to ingratiate themselves with an eccentric loner who appears to be rich? Or is it all made up? And when Roger, desperate for Rachel to make good on her promise to let the couple live with her, has sex with her (we are informed he has an enormous "winkie"), is that real?

Rachel's madness is rooted in two deep-seated needs: a need to be loved, physically and otherwise, and a need to live in a world without pain or suffering. Her reinvention of herself in Bristol allows her to imagine herself as an object of obvious affection for everyone ("You're quite a girl!" she says to herself as she sings showtunes in public), and to imagine herself presiding over a world where disappointment, much less death, disease, and pain are shut out of the garden. In the end, these very human and recognizable needs spiral out of control so badly that she's discovered by the authorities wearing a tattered, dirty wedding dress in the park and talking to herself. Many of us pass people in similar straits every day, and maybe we wonder "How did they get there?" Wish Her Safe at Home shows us how simply and easily it might be done.