Holding Patterns in Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep
Reviewed by Michael Greenstein
Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel The Safekeep is, by all accounts, a page-turner. Yet, what gives the reader cause to pause when the prose, in addition to the plot, grips and thickens? The intensity of The Safekeep results from the passionate relationship between Isabel, the protagonist, and her houseguest Eva, as well as the mysterious history and identity of the isolated house in the Netherlands where she lives. At the same time as the narrative unfolds, there is a magnetic pull of a countercurrent that both heightens plot development and arrests it in forceful consideration. That is, an overarching holding pattern within the narrative draws attention to page turning and the physical act of reading. That relentless pattern accompanies Isabel throughout her life in her Dutch country home in 1961, with atmospheric and cinematic techniques worthy of Ingmar Bergman.
The novel opens with the protagonist gardening, digging up the past: “Isabel found a broken piece of ceramic under the roots of a dead gourd.” This fragment represents her repressed life and the buried history of Europe after World War II: gourd, garden, and ground bear witness to post-traumatic events surrounding Isabel and Eva, as the former roots around in her psyche. This well-wrought shard is rooted in tragedy, but becomes a vessel for illumination and redemption. Between seasons the vegetable garden “was shrinking into itself” – much as the repressed protagonist has shrunk into herself over the years. The “lip of summer” matches the rim of the ceramic piece with its blue flowers and “suggestion of a hare’s leg where the crockery had broken.” And this lip of summer will enter into the lips of lovers as the novel progresses, and Isabel tumbles down the rabbit warren of history.
Isabel gardens on her knees, as if in supplication for her misdeeds and humbling fall. Her hands are gloved – one layer of protection – but the “shard nicked through her glove, pierced a little hole” – a loss of innocence in her protective barrier. The narrator closely examines this nick: “It wasn’t a wound and it didn’t bleed.” Yet Isabel is wounded in other ways as she stretches the skin of her palm tight, looking for a puncture. “There was none, only a sting of pain that left quickly.” Nevertheless, the pain and wound plague Isabel throughout the course of the novel. Back in the house she washes the piece “and held it in watery hands” – hands which take on a life of their own. Isabel comments on the chinaware to her younger brother Hendrik: “They are not for touching. They are for keeping.” The domestic drama between touching and keeping plays out in the various connotations of “hand-me-down” in The Safekeep.
The pattern in the plate of three hares chasing one another in a circle is telling. With the aura of a fable, the race between triangle and circle hints at the tensions among the three siblings in the family. And that tension manifests itself in manual motion. Thus, when Isabel meets Hendrik, he is rubbing “a thumb into his eye,” while she touches her hat and her nape, these suggestive gestures recurring throughout the novel. Characters repeatedly lean on all parts of the house, as structure and character intermingle. Isabel constantly worries about losing the house to her older brother, Louis: “could she perhaps have some hold on the deed,” even though their Uncle Karel had purchased the house with Louis in mind to take possession eventually. After her discussion with Karel, there is “a trembling of her hands,” and she pictures herself “clawing into the walls,” like some kind of caged animal that nevertheless has to cover itself within this structure. In more than one sense, the house is her safekeep, and she must hold onto it at all costs.
Once a year, on the day of her mother’s death, Isabel takes one of the plates for breakfast, and the “hares would appear in fragments from under her meal: a tail, a foot, an ear” – the animal parts corresponding to the human anatomy in this fable of identities. Her neighbour Johan is fond of her, but she finds him disgusting: “Johan put his hot hand over Isabel’s under the table.” She is equally repulsed by Eva, whom Louis has brought to the house for an indefinite stay. When she hears about Louis’s plans, she “pressed the heel of her hand between her eyes,” body parts moving within an individual and between characters. And all of these dramatic gestures simultaneously advance and arrest the plot. When Eva becomes acquainted with Isabel, the former “steadied herself with a hand to Isabel’s waist,” and “Isabel felt the weight of that touch. . . pressed her own hand to it.” These manual gestures reflect the flurry of the three hares, from Johan’s fingers fanned out on Isabel’s waist, to Hendrik’s locking her at the elbows (“she didn’t like this kind of touch”), to her own reaction to all of this tactile attention: “Isabel worried the skin on the back of her hand.”
As Eva insinuates herself into the house, she appears to take some kind of possession in spite of her mistreatment at Isabel’s hands. “Eva leaned into the room, hand on the doorpost.” Eva touched things, talked about things she touched,” while “Isabel dug her nails into her wrists,” suggesting martyrdom or self-crucifixion. In the dramatic exchanges Eva holds the broken plate with the hare, while Isabel holds Eva’s diary: “A leather-bound notebook with a pen keeping place in the pages” – a book within a book where the reader safekeeps place in the pages. Isabel thinks that Eva wants to squeeze her at the waist again, and “her fingers were growing numb again.” Hands are a significant synecdoche for numbness of body, spirit, and psyche.
Just as Eva keeps a diary, so Isabel makes an inventory in her own notebook with floorplans and placement of household items. She fills a page, tears it out, and folds it into her pocket. Sometimes she reaches for it, “just to touch it.” She shares that tactile habit with the reader who touches and turns pages. Eva displaces a photograph of Isabel’s mother with a photo of her own mother. “Isabel plucked the picture from its hold.” The narrator pauses to experience the tactile quality of connecting to another mother: “She fingered the scalloped edge, trying to imagine, and then abruptly stopped.” The image takes a hold on her. A domestic holding dialogue between the two women ensues: Eva “held herself, and went down to a crouch, and Isabel got out of her chair, went to the window, and held the curtain further aside.” Eva studies Isabel – “how Isabel kept her hands fisted at her side,” as if in combat. Isabel stands at the kitchen counter, “arms locked,” but remembers her mother who would repeatedly drag a fingertip in a line from the top of her forehead to her chin, in imitation of the delineating reading process.
These are the post-traumatic touches of Isabel’s joyless childhood during and after the war. She remembers holding Hendrik when airplanes bombed overhead “and nothing was allowed to touch him.” After nightmares she wakes “with a hand at one’s throat – one’s own hand, at one’s own throat.” For she has never known “the touch of another.” In an episode where Eva drops her earring, and Isabel suspects her of stealing, their struggle focusses on hands: Eva tries to hide her hand from view, Isabel grabs her wrist in a tight grip, and wrenches open her fingers. “There was a red mark where she’d held her – and she had held her, so very tightly.” Alone in her room after the struggle, the protagonist examines her emotional turmoil through her hands: “She touched her cheek …. Her fingers to her lips: she pushed two inside.” When she wakes up from her dream, there is “the drag of a hand.” In the conscious and subconscious of omniscient narration, the author’s hand is omnipresent, a ubiquitous touch. The oneiric hand drags and writes itself.
Household items go missing, and that accounts for part of the novel’s mystery. Another part of the drama revolves around Isabel’s washing the chinaware, as the “hares went around and around in a circle,” a repetitive motion, a refrain for the fabled cycle of domestic familiarity. Yet the house shared by Isabel and Eva is unheimlich, and the circular motion points to the uncanny nature of their experience. “Isabel held the jug in the dip of her palm.” These domestic scenes are worthy of the paintings of the Dutch masters. Thinking about the church sermon on St. Augustine and his pears, an exercise in disobedience, Isabel reflects on her own temptation and undoing: “A grip caught on Isabel’s lungs.” Between drip and grip, she exits the church, “hands pushed to the wall.” She takes notice of Eva in a new light “when she held a pen to write scribbled notes.” The reader participates in her voyeurism, scribbling notes in writerly texts.
St. Augustine’s parable of pears reverberates in the novel where Eva is the forbidden fruit in the garden of self-knowledge. Eva purchases two pears in the market and offers one to Isabel, who takes it to her bedroom where she “held the pear in the cup of her hand.” The sensual consumption occurs at the edge of her bed: “It was a water-heavy fruit, full-ripe.” The hyphenated, pregnant adjectives surround the pear. “The first bite spilled on Isabel’s skirt.” The stain remains, “a cloying brush to the back of her hand.” Once she has devoured the gift of Eva, there is no turning back. Hare and pear, wrist and waist align, as the novelist plots the household.
Even when she enlists nature, van der Wouden can’t escape her pattern. Her protagonist walks with Hendrik: “Along the streets of Utrecht the sun had spread her arms wide open” in contrast to Isabel’s narrowed limbs. As she walks, she imagines Eva back in the house touching objects, while Hendrik takes her hand in his in this symphony conducted by the characters’ hands. Indeed, the house becomes its own Concertgebouw filled with sounds and silences, lingering largos and pulsive allegros of turning pages and holding pauses. Isabel returns to her house to find Eva on the telephone with Louis. In response to the endearments exchanged over the phone, Isabel remembers when she was young and wanted to be held, and wanted to put her fists through things in the attraction and repulsion of love. In this dance of hands, “A clamp of a hold tightened on Isabel’s lungs,” while Eva “touched her cheek, kept her hand there.” In this anatomy of melancholy, The Safekeep enters the gothic tradition of Wuthering Heights and The Scarlet Letter.
In the dance scene Eva holds out her hands, palms up, to invite Isabel to dance in an emotional tug of war, “to be pushed away, to be pulled again.” Eva takes Isabel’s hands, places them on her waist, and holds her by her wrists. The narrator choreographs her prose in rhythmic syntax: “A hold, a dance.” Isabel pulls Eva in, “two hands holding the good dip of a waist. She was a touch …. She fisted her fingers in – grabbed.” In the kitchen Eva takes the dishes from Isabel’s hands, and the dance continues: Isabel’s fingers touch Eva’s hair, while Eva’s fingers are tight on Isabel’s shoulders. They kiss, and the kiss “held – held” – repeating the amorous caress of history, echoed in Anne Michaels’s novel, Held.
On the way to a lake Eva compares herself to a lost glove, the part pertaining to a larger whole that remains to be found. Nature participates once again in the ubiquitous holding pattern, connecting anatomy and geography: “The rivers in this region reached into the land like fingers.” While the others go for a swim, the protagonist reads: “Isabel stared at the same page for over an hour.” Her reading habit contrasts with the reader’s, who turns the page, eager to be swept along the riverine plot. On the beach, Eva engages in “a tug-of-war, Eva allowing herself to be caught. Held.” The erotic holding pattern engages the reader caught in the tug of turning pages of a gripping novel. As Hendrik explains, “A pretty deception.” The scene is filled with echoes of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. “Isabel did not touch herself …. never the promise of a touch.” Yet the reader is touched and continues to turn pages in the pleasures of the text, where Isabel closes her eyes, “a bright warm palm of sky to her face,” while she puts “a hand to her throat and was holding herself like that.”
This obsessive-compulsive holding pattern continues in Chapter 10 in the intimacy between Eva and Isabel where “Sunrise came with the early hand of summer.” Even the seasons and all of nature participate in the manual labour of love. When Isabel touches her mother’s secretary desk, it triggers a remembrance of things past when she would crawl under the secretary, the holder and keeper of secrets. “She would put her hand to the underside of the wood to feel the scritch-scratch of the pen.” The engaged reader feels the scratch of van der Wouden’s pen carving the initials EDH into the bottom of the drawer. In this exchange of hidden identities, Isabel puts a hand over Eva’s leather-bound notebook on the desk, “as she would over a Bible.” This convergence and insertion of the biblical intertext prepares for the Hebrew words at the end of the novel, drawn from Isaiah. Eva’s notebook, Isabel’s folded paper, and the pages of The Safekeep all participate in the dynamic of a gripping page-turner.
The acts of reading and writing further converge at the end of Part II when Isabel finally gets hold of Eva’s book. She pages through it quickly, “Passed a hand over it, as if trying to see whether it would change, as if the ink was a trick -- an illusion, a game.” The novelist’s sleight of hand and legerdemain pull a hare out of the porcelain cover. Eva’s diary continues the pattern in 1960 when her fingers were swollen: “Writing hurts.” The pain and pleasure of the text. After reading Eva’s diary, Isabel experiences loneliness in Eva’s absence. “Every day she woke up and every day the house unfolded around her like a dark hand.” The house of fiction enfolds reader, narrator, and protagonist.
She visits the synagogue in town where the frost and neighbouring buildings “had touched it,” but it is touched by even more. Hebrew scripture from Isaiah, 56:7 is inscribed on the building. She returns home to check the quotation: “Her Bible she kept in her room, on her shelf. The little hare leaned its little back against it.” Languorous and lingering, this leaning juxtaposition adds commentary to the novel, the fable pressed and repressed against the Bible. She reads alongside the reader: “For my house will be called a house of devotion for all.” Isabel’s finger is next to the verse’s number seven. “She touched the page …. She touched the word house. She touched the word devotion.” The vows and vowels make their way across the pages of safekeeping and holding to combine Isabel, Augustine, and Isaiah.
From Isabel’s hard touch at the beginning of the novel to Eva’s “sleep-soft” hands over Isabel’s belly at the end, Yael van der Wouden and her reader write and rest. Those soft hands on the belly also touch Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of Arnolfini. Isabel opens house, heart, and hand to welcome the stranger within herself. And the reader enters.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION
About the Author
Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher. She currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank", has received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018. The Safekeep is her debut novel.
About the Reviewer
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.
Book Details
Publisher : Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster (May 28 2024)
Language : English
Hardcover : 272 pages
ISBN-10 : 1668034344
ISBN-13 : 978-1668034347