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Summary
Summary
One of the The Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Fiction Books of 2019
"A gem of a book . . . lyrical, tender, and profoundly insightful."--Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone
A beautiful, bracingly honest debut novel about the triangle formed between a young woman and the couple whose life she enters one transformative year: a story about love and compassion, the fluidity of desire, and the myriad ways of devotion.
Ella is nearing thirty, and not yet living the life she imagined. Her artistic ambitions as a student in Minnesota have given way to an unintended career in caregiving. One spring, Bryn--a retired carpenter--hires her to help him care for Jill, his wife of many years. A car accident caused a brain injury that has left Jill verbally diminished; she moves about the house like a ghost of her former self, often able to utter, like an incantation, only the words that comprise this novel's title.
As Ella is drawn ever deeper into the couple's household, her presence unwanted but wholly necessary, she is profoundly moved by the tenderness Bryn shows toward the wife he still fiercely loves. Ella is startled by the yearning this awakens in her, one that complicates her feelings for her girlfriend, Alix, and causes her to look at relationships of all kinds--between partners, between employer and employee, and above all between men and women--in new ways.
Tightly woven, humane and insightful, tracing unflinchingly the most intimate reaches of a young woman's heart and mind, Say Say Say is a riveting story about what it means to love, in a world where time is always running out.
Author Notes
LILA SAVAGE is originally from Minneapolis. Prior to writing fiction, she spent nearly a decade working as a caregiver. She lives in San Francisco.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Savage's startling, tender debut follows Ella, a young caregiver hired to help a woman of rapidly diminishing mental capability, and the relationship Ella develops with her and her husband. At the novel's start, Ella is on the cusp of 30 and living in Minneapolis with her girlfriend, Alix, whom she loves deeply and uncomplicatedly. After dropping out of graduate school, Ella makes a modest living as a caregiver, though she harbors vague artistic inclinations. Her newest client is Jill, who, at 60, is younger than her usual clientele; her mental state has deteriorated ever since she was in a car accident over a decade ago. Unable to hold coherent conversations or wash herself, Jill has been taken care of by her husband, Bryn, a retired carpenter. Initially hired to provide Bryn with a reprieve, Ella finds herself gradually immersed in Bryn and Jill's lives, and soon her role as Jill's companion evolves into something more intimate and complex. Over the next year, Jill's condition worsens and Bryn becomes more visibly strained even as the force of his love for Jill stays steady, and what Ella witnesses between the two of them challenges her ideas of love, spirituality, and empathy. Quietly forceful, Savage's luminous debut is beautifully written, and will stay with readers long after the final page. Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb, the Gernert Company. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Artist-turned-caretaker Ella gets hired as a part-time companion for Jill, plagued by early onset dementia since a serious accident years ago and barely able to speak. Perhaps even more crucial than tending to Jill, Ella gives Jill's husband, Bryn, a respite from his steadfast caring for her. Inside their hermetic home, basically Jill's entire world, Ella tries to meet Jill on her level and honor the couple, whose ""roles were stripped genderless through a wildfire of loss."" But Ella, who's committed to her girlfriend, is surprised by the flush she gets in the presence of movie-star-handsome Bryn, who seems young, strong, and still able to find joy in the face of his beloved wife's deterioration. Savage's debut unfolds in dense, descriptive paragraphs that are mostly transcriptions of first-person narrator Ella's thoughts. This level of intimacy can get bogged-down in the details; action and conversation occur largely off-page, and tensions are as much obscured as revealed. Still, Savage explores interesting territory, in particular, commitment, aging and caretaking, and gender's influence on all of it.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE JOURNAL I DID NOT KEEP: NEW AND SELECTED WRITING, by Lore Segal. (Melville House, $28.99.) For almost six decades Segal has quietly produced some of the best fiction and essays in American literature, as this generous sampler attests. VERY NICE, by Marcy Dermansky. (Knopf, $25.95.) Dermansky's fourth novel is a mordant satire of wealth and art, in which a creative writing professor sleeps first with his student, then with her newly divorced mother, then takes up residence in their vast Connecticut estate. A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE: ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM and its assault on the American mind, by Harriet A. Washington. (Little, Brown Spark, $28.) Washington shows how public policy and other factors expose minority groups to disproportionate pollution and blight, with direct consequences for their success. BECOMING SUPERMAN: MY JOURNEY FROM POVERTY TO Hollywood, by J. Michael Straczynski. (Harper Voyager/HarperCollins, $28.99.) Best known as a TV writer, Straczynski here recalls a horrific childhood: a Nazi-loving father, a mentally ill mother, a predatory grandmother. Comics and good teachers saved him. SAY SAY SAY, by Lila Savage. (Knopf, $24.) Savage's brisk, intimate novel traces the complicated interior life of a young woman who drops out of graduate school to work as a caregiver for a man and his brain-damaged wife.
Guardian Review
A vivid insight into the thoughts and feelings of a young woman who works as a carer. When Ella tells people that she works as a freelance home carer for the elderly, they tend to react with a gushing mixture of approval and self-deprecation: "How wonderful. I could never do what you do." One young woman is entirely unabashed about the human instinct to put one's own emotions at the centre of every story, replying: "Oh, now I feel bad." US author Lila Savage worked as a caregiver for nearly a decade, and her wise and understated first novel explores a carer's thoughts and feelings as she steps into the crucible of other people's suffering. At first, Ella was "wide open" to the all-consuming dramas of the people she worked for, but she has learned over the years to "step in and out of grief, to sample it on demand"; to offer up a version of herself and ration her own responses. The work is "pink collar, no doubt about it; it was utterly, overwhelmingly, women's work", and the labour is emotional as well as physical, involving enforced intimacy with failing bodies, long stretches of tedium interspersed with panic, isolation combined with overfamiliarity. At nearly 30, this isn't the life Ella imagined for herself; she had hoped to escape her evangelical lower middle-class upbringing to join "the creative classes", and she still makes desultory efforts to paint and draw. But she alternates constantly between two opposing certainties: both that she is wasting her talents and her precious youth, and that "each action she took mattered, whether it was changing a soiled disposable brief with kindness and tact or listening to a tedious reminiscence for the thousandth time". The novel focuses on her time caring for Jill, who is only 60. Jill's mind has been destroyed by a brain injury rather than age, and now she drifts through the house she shares with her long-suffering husband, Bryn, cradling a naked plastic doll and babbling her inexpressible distress, using a verbal tic that gives the novel its title ("No. I don't know. I don't know! Say say say"). As everything that makes Jill who she is crumbles away, Ella must negotiate her relationship with both of them, and with herself: what she can give them, what affirmation or purpose she might need from them, whether Bryn could be a friend, or a father figure, or a lover. This is an intensely serious and careful book, which grapples with an unfashionable subject, the drive to be a good person, while wittily weighing up human fallibility. The narrative voice knows much more about Ella than she knows about herself - her vanity, her self-satisfaction, her laziness and blinkered thinking - but it also tracks, with sincerity and compassion, her attempts at authenticity and self-knowledge, her desire to create art and approach the sublime. It beautifully conjures the bounds of the self and the mind's efforts to overcome them, the way our ambitions and limitations are in constant dialogue. Throughout Jill's deterioration - predictable, inevitable, unbearable - it cherishes the rhythms of everyday life and the slow comforts of shared endurance, even in the midst of chaos and extremity: "the same chip in the plate as yesterday, but also the memory of yesterday's meal". The novel is particularly interesting about sexual politics and the romantic self. As a woke young bisexual woman, Ella knows the effects of living in a patriarchy, but she doesn't know how to circumvent the damage - "what bits of her psyche were herself and what bits were scar tissue". Her relationship with girlfriend Alix is an unfolding lesson in how the messy imperfections of love can surprise us, trumping the sterile expectations of what we think we want. Before she met Alix, Ella had thought she was attracted to "masculine of centre" girlfriends because, as Savage coolly reminds us, women are taught to eroticise power. The problem of men and women remains a live one, however, especially when it comes to Bryn. She is moved and surprised by Bryn's "Sisyphean" care for Jill. "Why was this so startling? Did she think so little of men that it surprised her when they displayed the decency she would expect from a woman? Or did she think so little of women that they didn't warrant tender, self?sacrificing care from a man?" Like Ella, Say Say Say asks difficult questions, of society and of the self. There are no easy answers, but in the novel's quietly radical choice of subject matter and its open-eyed, open-hearted curiosity, it illuminates both the intimate dramas usually hidden behind closed doors and the shifting mysteries of personality and relationship.
Kirkus Review
A millennial adrift learns about life while caring for others.Anyone who has ever worked in the helping professions knows that these jobs can create strange intimacies. This is potentially fruitful territory, but whether or not this novel works depends very much upon how one feels about its protagonist. Ella is almost 30. After dropping out of her graduate program, she started working as a caregiver. This isn't her chosen vocation; it's just what she does to pay rent, buy groceries, and pick up vintage tchotchkes at thrift stores. She lives with a woman named Alix who is her sexual and romantic partner, but Ella doesn't like to think of herself as part of a couple. When a retired carpenter named Bryn hires Ella to care for his mentally impaired wife, Jill, Ella becomes a part-time member of their household. There isn't a lot of dialogue in this novel, nor is there much in the way of action. What there are, mostly, are third-person descriptions of what's going on inside Ella's head as she cares for Jill, gets to know Bryn, and watches the pair interact. Ella has a number of revelations about love and life. Mostly, she thinks about herself. This is true of most people, probably, but it doesn't make for much of a story unless you find Ella as fascinating as her author does. The most interesting aspect of this novel is the weird relationship between the protagonist and the narrator. Consider this passage: "Ella was ashamed of how her own beauty comforted and seduced her; she visited it like a secret lover, she stroked it softly like a young boy watching television, one hand tucked into his pajama bottoms, fondling his small, flaccid treasure." This very long sentence contains what is surely one of the most awkward similes in contemporary fiction, but it also shows us an author who is maybe a little bit too in love with her heroine, not to mention a bit too in love with her own voice.A tedious first novel that might have been a rich short story. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Later, looking back, Ella would be hard pressed to remember any details that had set this interview apart. It was sad, but then it was always sad, or Ella wouldn't be needed. She had been working as a companion for elderly people for six years, and somewhere along the way, sadness had lost its power to shock Ella the way it once had. It still reached her, but it was like recognizing a flavor, like eating a jelly bean without looking first to see what color it was. Oh this, she might think, I know this taste. This is incremental loss. This is trying to remember. This is regret. This is forgetting, forgotten, gone. This flavor is grief. Jill was different from most of Ella's other clients: she was young, only sixty, the victim of an accident rather than the mental and physical crush of age. The tragedy of such premature loss was unfamiliar to Ella, but she stepped up to it dutifully, felt for its contours, pressed the tip of her tongue to its bitterness, and, ultimately, shouldered its weight. What was her burden compared to Jill's? Compared to those who loved her? She had liked them, immediately and more than usual. She felt they might have been friends, ordinary friends, were the circumstances ordinary, which, of course, they weren't. Nick, Jill's son, was only a few years older than Ella, and he had an endearing sincerity to him, not earnestness but an unusual frankness, as though he couldn't be bothered to dilute his humor or irritation or sadness into the tepid, circumspect conversation of most people. His father, Bryn, had an easy charm about him, and only his increasing talkativeness as he warmed up to Ella betrayed how isolating his circumstances must be. They had been dealing with the aftermath of Jill's car accident and head injury for more than a decade now. Jill had seemed mostly herself for a while, but then came the crying, and the tantrums that seemed out of all proportion, and now she was sometimes like an advanced Alzheimer's patient, mumbling semi-coherently, wandering around, requiring near-constant supervision. Bryn had retired three years earlier to care for her, and her needs had only grown since then. Nick helped as much as he could, usually on weekends, but he and his wife lived up in Hinckley and couldn't realistically drive into Minneapolis more than once a week. They had gathered in the living room for the interview, with Ella a lonely figure on the puffy leather couch and the two men standing, as though resting might betray how weary they truly were. "I hope this doesn't sound creepy," Nick said, "but once I learned your full name I checked to see if we have any Facebook friends in common. You know Trent Olson?" She nodded and he smiled with real friendliness, although there was a restlessness to his bearing that had probably read as hyperactivity when he was a child and, now that he was in his thirties, looked more like athleticism, maybe. But though his was the kind of masculinity that held little appeal for Ella, she watched for cues he might be flirting with her. Nick excused himself to go check on Jill, leaving Bryn and Ella to themselves. Bryn seemed pleased that he would have more time to explore interests outside of caregiving, and also pleased that he had someone to discuss it with. "We're too deep into spring to do everything I want in the garden," Bryn said, "but soon there will be tons of green beans to pick, and raspberries, and zucchini, and then we'll really get into tomato season. Jill used to be able to help with the harvesting but not anymore. I could occupy her for nearly an hour at a time picking raspberries on a nice day, until eventually she began to see it as a chore, and then she could no longer do it anyway." He relayed these stages of decline with what seemed an easy candor. "Do you grow any rhubarb?" Ella asked. "Not really on purpose, but there's some that keeps stubbornly coming up on the side of the house." "I like to make chilled sweet rhubarb soup, it's so summery. But I live in an apartment now so I can't grow my own and it seems wrong to buy rhubarb in a grocery store." "I know what you mean. When Nick was small, he would take a juice glass of sugar out to the rhubarb patch and break stems off to dip and eat. It's not a grocery-store kind of food." Again Ella checked to see how this nostalgia registered on Bryn's face and found that his eyes were smiling with an uncomplicated cheerfulness that matched his grin. "I'd like to sign up for a Community Ed class or two also," Bryn said. "Since I retired to take care of Jill, I haven't kept pace with the latest technology for carpentry." As he described the dimensional capabilities of computer programs for woodworking, Ella decided they would become friends. A more sentimental or less experienced caregiver might have assumed that this didn't require deciding, but Ella had done some version of this many times with others, and had learned early on the benefits of some degree of detachment. Ella usually found clients through her Craigslist ad, and sometimes through word of mouth, because an agency would take too large a cut and would require her to have a car. Her first client had been her friend Jake's grandmother, whom she had known and cared about before the fog descended; Ella had been job hunting after dropping out of graduate school when Jake's mom had asked, "Could you visit my mother a few days a week?" At first Ella had been shocked that she could earn even a meager living this way (fifteen dollars an hour to start, twenty after the first year), just listening to Betty's meandering stories, making sandwiches, playing checkers, feeding the ducks. With Betty, Ella had remained wide open; as the weeks and months progressed, the air between the two women had become charged like metal or water conducting electricity, the pangs of loss and death intermittent but shocking. If Betty didn't answer the door of her senior apartment, Ella would feel panic swell in her throat; her body would prepare itself for impact as she scurried to find some staff member with a master key. Each time, Betty would have been napping, or getting her hair done in the basement of the building, or using the bathroom, and Ella would cry with relief, shaken and grateful, like the mother of a child who has stopped one step away from the path of a speeding bus. This was not a sustainable response, not for all the workdays in a week, all the weeks in a year, six years, half a dozen clients and counting. And so Ella had learned to step in and out of grief, to sample it on demand. She didn't seek to block it out entirely because the poignancy was among the few rewards of the job. It was a strange way to make a living: the slow creep of hours, the tedium of domesticity and isolation, morning talk shows bleeding into drowsy afternoon soaps, all pierced with looming mortality and surreal delusions. She would succumb to the boredom and drift, as though submerged in a lake. The cool water would tug her gently; sounds were muffled, it was tranquil, and then something would compel her to burst through the surface and confront the frailty and sorrow and humiliation of decline. For a moment, she would be fully present in this sadness, porous in her empathy. It was almost unbearable, but at the same time, it seemed like a gift, to feel so much. She began to feel, rather than know, that the promise of death infused the adrenaline of living, and she was grateful to have this lesson at so little personal cost, because the tragedy belonged to someone who'd begun as a stranger. Ella alternated between certainty that her true talents were wasted in this unskilled service work and another kind of certainty, that each action she took mattered, whether it was changing a soiled disposable brief with kindness and tact or listening to a tedious reminiscence for the thousandth time, so that someone whose self was slipping from them might clutch it for a moment longer. The truth contained both of these elements but was far more complicated. Ella had other talents, though perhaps none were greater than these; what were her elaborate meals or mediocre paintings to anyone but her? And if this caregiving, this tact and empathy, represented the best she had to offer, then it was also true that she offered these gifts as infrequently as she wrote her occasional poem. More often than not, she browsed through a magazine, she microwaved a hot dog, she did laundry just for an excuse to leave the room, she drifted in her mental lake as her client dozed--it all hinged upon her whim. And then there was this other nagging concern: the way her role often felt uncomfortably voyeuristic--she could hold it all at arm's length, even if only for a while. Nick came back into the room and said, with a laugh but also a degree of the derision grown sons are inclined to display toward their fathers, "Dad, stop boring Ella. I'm sure she has places to be." It wasn't that Bryn was being inappropriate; it was more like Nick saw the tang of his father's loneliness as a reflection on him. Although Bryn remained smiling, his voice took on an edge as he responded to Nick. "We're just getting acquainted," he said. "Oh, before you go, would you like to meet my mom?" Nick asked, turning toward Ella in a way that seemed to subtly exclude Bryn. "Of course," Ella said, making eye contact with Bryn as though it were his question she was answering. The three of them followed the sound of a television down a dim hallway and into a small den. Ella expected Jill to be sitting, but she stood with her back partially turned away from the television and a naked plastic baby doll in her hands. Jill looked so much younger than Ella expected that it startled her, momentarily, out of her detached professionalism. Jill was slim, and there was no gray in her curly red hair. Her freckled face was nearly unlined except for the deepening channels that ran from the sides of her nose to the corners of her mouth, and the reading glasses perched on her delicately pointed nose suggested that she had perhaps just set down an interesting magazine article to perform her role as hostess. "Hello," Ella said. "So nice to meet you. What a pleasant room." She turned as though admiring it, took in the windows illuminated by afternoon sun and the old, dark-stained built-in bookshelf. Eventually she would come to have each title and trinket it contained memorized, but today she turned back to Jill to see how her greeting was being received. Jill seemed agitated, although it was difficult to tell if this was in response to the newly crowded room. She muttered something beneath her breath; Ella couldn't tell if it was addressed to her or to the doll. Bryn stepped closer to Jill and put an arm around her, squeezing her into a brief side hug. Ella observed that they seemed at once just like a long-married couple in that moment of casual affection and entirely unlike one in the clear disparity between their capacities. "Say say say," Jill said, and then she crooned lovingly to the doll, ran a dirty-nailed finger down the doll's plump cheek. Excerpted from Say Say Say: A Novel by Lila Savage All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
