There’s a part of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 I think about frequently. The narrator, who teaches creative writing at a university in New York City, is visited by a student during office hours. The student is impassioned but incoherent, rambling about poetry and porousness and molecules. There’s something wrong with his language, his affect; he’s associating too freely—maybe it’s the result of an amphetamine (prescribed or not), maybe problems at home. “Calvin . . . a lot of the things you’re saying aren’t really making sense to me,” Lerner’s autofictional narrator says, but then hesitates internally: “Was that true?”
Like other moments in Lerner’s writing, this passage and the self-doubting spiral it sparks are trying to say something not only about the fragility of mental well-being, but also about how language holds up social norms. What is it about this student’s syntax, the narrator wonders, that puts me on edge? Is it so different from my own? Particularly for a poet, where’s the line between invention and incoherence? And what’s keeping me (not only as a poet but also a person prone to anxiety and depression) from teetering over the same lip this person has? What about our language reveals that we’re no longer tethered to society or reality—in control, functional—and is it so problematic not to be?
Danish author Fine Gråbøl’s debut novel, What Kingdom, recently out in Martin Aitken’s attuned translation, is similarly interested in what Gråbøl calls “the grammar of the ill” and its social implications. Gråbøl’s perspective and voice, however, are completely different from Lerner’s. Speaking from within the confines of a residential psychiatric treatment facility in Copenhagen, the first-person narrator’s voice is stripped of neuroses and self-doubt, and is frequently dissociated or displaced by the other characters and vibrant objects that populate the claustrophobic institution. Compared to Lerner’s trademark garrulousness, Gråbøl’s prose is pared back, muffled almost. “I’m not mute,” the narrator says, “but I leave language to the room around me.”
What Kingdom follows the daily life of the narrator, who, along with four others—Lasse, Sara, Hector, and Marie—lives on the fifth floor of the facility, which, under Danish law, provides temporary housing to adults aged eighteen to thirty. In contrast to the other floors, which house permanent residents, the youth ward, or Ungeenheden—the original Danish title—is a transient space, meant to bridge the gap between the hospital (or, in one character’s case, prison) and the “normal” world outside. Here, residents are permitted the privilege of decorating their own rooms (though no sharp objects are allowed), stocking their small fridges (though the narrator keeps little besides yogurt and tortellini in hers), and locking their doors from the inside, although the staff all have keys for when the inevitable happens.
For the most part, life along this “sweet corridor” is uneventful, a fluorescent, medicated, linoleum-lined blur of repetition. The residents take turns cooking communal dinners (sushi, pancakes, burgers), watch television and movies in the rec room—Girl, Interrupted, which the novel’s English title alludes to, is a favorite—go on organized outings with the staff, and attend concerts and karaoke nights with the rest of the building. They have meetings with psychologists and psychiatrists, are administered pills (if they, like the narrator, have been deemed unable to “look after” their medication themselves) and experimental treatments, reflect on their progress (or lack thereof) and treatment plans. The repetitive quality of their days is in part prescribed and in part self-inflicted—“My daily routines are crucial to my survival,” the narrator says, though the cyclicality of these rituals gives the sense less of forward movement than of the stasis of institutional suppression.
Moments of psychological crisis (boiling water poured over an arm, a window forced open, wrists cut with a razor) are also woven into these recurrent performances of normalcy. That these are often relayed in the same exacting, distanced tone of voice as are the contents of a fridge or a description of a room makes for an unnerving reading experience. A few pages in, for example, something has happened to the narrator, though it’s unclear what:
I lie down flat on the floor. Above me the ceiling hangs suspended like a fluid-filled membrane, density pulls me down and I roll over onto my stomach, drag myself across the floor into the bathroom and activate the alarm…They lift up one of my arms, then the other, and note the way my arms no longer belong to the rest of my body, they were never supposed to.
Or later: “I’ve decided not to speak anymore; what good does it do, a voice, the hard fabric of my cotton top stains red with the thick, lumpy blood that with some delay runs from my arm after my quick, deep incision.” Though these scenes are narrated in the first person, the narrator is barely present, outside herself, the prose reflecting the estrangement of dissociation. “It’s hard to tell if it’s the heat or the pills that make us all so slumberous,” she says, and it is unclear whether the detached relaying of these events, like the insomnia, the shakes, the weight fluctuations, and visual disturbances, is a symptom or a side effect.
Of course, in a place like this, episodes of self-harm, violence, and mental health emergencies are mundane, everyday occurrences. But Gråbøl seems less interested in this fact than in the (intentionally) blunting effects of psychiatric and psychological treatment on the person. “They call containment of the emotional register treatment,” the narrator writes, and evidence of this is reflected in the hypnotically inhibited prose. The novel is broken into sections that rarely fill a page or even half of one, and the sentences are short, truncated even, sometimes in a poetic way (“Splendid hearts, free hands”) but often not. A sentence fragment that could be a reference to a song or another book but isn’t. The brevity is beautiful, and also something more. The first-person voice registers as restrained and stream-of-consciousness at once—maybe it’s something like a medicated stream of consciousness, an institutionalized stream of consciousness? The diction is at turns casual, colloquial, and childish, and then abruptly formal or high literary (“My favorite scene is when they abscond from the institution,” a line of dialogue reads). Occasionally, I want to blame the translator, but when I look back to the original, I see that Aitken’s translation is very good; its clipped elegance and slight anglicisms suit not only Gråbøl’s voice but also the novel’s attempt to render literary experiences that are not usually described in literature.
Perhaps there is something dually poetic and childish about the way the narrator expresses herself because there is something simultaneously adultifying and infantilizing about the institution—particularly when it is part of a public health care system—and, by extension, the state, whose interest in rehabilitation is not so much personal or social as economic. While the youth ward and its residents might be funded by the government, the benchmark of recovery here is not personal growth but the ability to reenter society as a working, tax-paying, “socially adequate citizen.” As the narrator admits, it’s tempting to stay in these subsidized facilities indefinitely, though that’s not what they’re intended for. She describes the draw of the permanent residences located in the city, where each unit contains a small kitchen and two rooms, and sometimes even a balcony, and wonders: “Why look for anything better than this?”
A current trend in contemporary Scandinavian literature is the blending of fictional prose and essayistic argumentation, and What Kingdom, too, intersperses its more narrative passages with straight-out social critique like this: “The grammar of the ill is gendered, but also a matter of economics; the curable versus the chronic, benefit rates and supplementary payments, diagnoses and deductibles. Cash assistance subsidies, invalidity pensions, disability supplements. The fatalism of psychiatry.” A progressively minded American might find it difficult to empathize with the narrator’s critical stance on Denmark’s public health system, though gratitude, I think, doesn’t have to preclude critique or the imagining of a better way. In fact, the novel makes clear the very real relief afforded by the absence of the economic (and, by extension, psychological) burden of needing to pay out of pocket (or by way of insurance) for routine and critical care. The novel, if anything, warns of the increasing neoliberalization and capitalization of the Danish welfare state and the effects of this on an already strained and shrinking public health care system. Turnover, we learn, is rampant and deeply damaging to those who make the mistake of trusting institutional caretakers: “I know I shouldn’t get attached to anyone whose job it is to care for me, the workers and wage earners who, like me, though in a different way altogether, are vulnerable to cutbacks, restructuring, reforms.” When Thomas, the section leader and the narrator’s contact person, is forced to step down, a violent scene ensues: the narrator, wanting to process the news in the fresh air, is tackled and pinned to the floor by staff members.
Though gender might be secondary to economics in Gråbøl’s novelistic universe, it’s hardly absent. In fact, it is a clear part of Gråbøl’s institutional critique: “We know what sort of diagnosis a person’s got even before they’ve mentioned it: boys are schizotypal, girls are borderline or obsessive-compulsive.” (The narrator herself has a borderline diagnosis, “but between what and what,” she wonders, citing Girl, Interrupted). And, more subtly, the novel could be said to continue a long lineage of mental health literature and culture. Besides Girl, Interrupted, the 1999 cult classic (based on the novel of the same name) in which Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie star as patients at a New England mental institution, Janet Frame, the late New Zealand author who wrote critically about psychiatric care, is another explicit reference (“I think about Janet Frame and understand everything: The gray crater of the long-dead mad lies empty enough to be filled with many truths together”). Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which was recently retranslated into Danish, seems to be another coordinate, as well as Scandinavian classics like Tove Ditlevsen’s The Faces and Amalie Skram’s Professor Hieronimus. Like these, What Kingdom deals critically with psychiatry, exploring how gender structures amplify the institutional project of containment and its effects.
Indeed, a reductive way to understand the difference between What Kingdom and the passage from 10:04 would be to chalk it up to gender. To say that the boys are verbose with big gestures and self-aware spirals, and the girls restrained, elusive, and prone to omission. Or, in a more nuanced way, to say that there’s something gendered to the displacement of What Kingdom’s narrative voice, which has to do with the effect of gender on language, or about the entanglement of gender with language and mental illness. To say that Gråbøl’s voice betrays the strain not only of writing in a coherent way about the experience of incoherence, but also of writing this experience from a gendered body.
This wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it would, I think, undervalue Gråbøl’s critical edge and the inventiveness of her prose. It would also risk neglecting What Kingdom’s thoroughgoing commitment to community and connection; its sharpness and its generosity as it humbly, exhaustedly, grasps after an alternative: “Could we not imagine treatments that are instead externally directed, involving the outside world gearing itself toward a wider and more comprehensive emotional spectrum? I don’t know.”
What Kingdom by Fine Gråbøl, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken (Archipelago Books, 2024).
Copyright © 2024 by Sherilyn Hellberg. All rights reserved.
