Sarah Bernstein's absurdist novel Study for Obedience navigates guilt and feeling like an outsider
Originally aired on Oct. 28, 2023.
Sarah Bernstein's Study for Obedience is an experimental, stream-of-consciousness deep dive into themes of identity, guilt, agency — and what it means to be an outsider.
In Study for Obedience, a woman moves to a "remote northern country" to be a housekeeper for her brother, whose wife recently left him. Soon after her arrival, the community is struck by unusual events from collective bovine hysteria to a potato blight. When the locals direct their growing suspicions at her, their hostility grows more and more palpable by the day.
Bernstein is a Montreal-born author and creative writing teacher currently living in Scotland. She was named one of Granta's best young British novelists in 2023. Her other books include her 2021 novel The Coming Bad Days and her collection of prose poems Now Comes the Lightning.
She spoke with The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about Study for Obedience.
I think one thing that stood out to me is that there are no names or places that you explicitly mention in the book. There's a moment in the book where the narrator says "the names were secret, they were sacred." What made you decide to kind of leave these details kind of opaque or vague?
I wanted to be able to leave that imaginative space open. What's been interesting for me is the responses of readers who have read very different things into it in terms of where it might be set or what the specific historical events that it might be referring to would be.
I think more broadly, I was interested in the way that this character seems to be obsessed with precision and that's evident in the way she tells her story. She's always trying to start again in some way to try to get it right. But that is also in conflict with that statement that you just read.
I felt that for this character, she was seeking to find different ways of relating to the world outside of the system of understanding that requires everything to be made transparent.- Sarah Bernstein
She believes that there's something about the relationship between herself and the rest of the world, whether that's people or the landscape or animals, that should remain unknowable. She's working through maybe almost an ethics of unknowability, trying to think of the things of the world outside of her own system of understanding.
That's one of the reasons I didn't want to necessarily pin down a name. I felt that for this character, she was seeking to find different ways of relating to the world — outside of the system of understanding that requires everything to be made transparent.
The unnamed narrator has this overriding desire to be good. How does that impact or affect her day-to-day life?
She's somebody who has always looked to other people and other scripts to organize her own way of being in the world. It's almost like she feels formless to herself.
She can't imagine what a life should be or what a life should look like. In the first instance, she looks to her family to tell her how to be, and then as she gets older, she has invested a lot, although she doesn't talk about it very much, in her attempt to have a career as a journalist.
She's somebody who has always looked to other people and other scripts to organize her own way of being in the world.- Sarah Bernstein
I was thinking a bit about what it means when you invest so much in your personality, in a career that feels like a vocation, but you can't make it in that career or you can't get a kind of security in that. She ends up leaving it — and that too doesn't give shape to her life. That's partly why she goes back to live with her brother, because she's still looking for that external validation, for the world to press against her and create a shape for her rather than vice versa.
In the book, the narrator doesn't seem to have much agency and this journey to kind of reclaim or recover or maybe even establish such agency takes her to places both physically and emotionally. What is agency to this character in the book?
I don't think she knows. It's something that sort of happens to her almost by surprise, right? There's one point in the novel where she starts to think that her language, her words, what she says might actually have the power to act in the world or to create change. She's really surprised by that.
And of course, because there's this question about her own unreliability, we don't know whether to trust in that or not, or how much up to this point that hasn't been the case. But equally she is spinning her own narrative. She's spinning us into her narrative. That does have its own kind of power.
But I think the question of agency, for me, in this book, was a complicated one. This is somebody who obviously has been poorly treated by her family, she's been poorly treated by her coworkers and she ascribes that to some kind of inborn quality that she has in her.
She's spinning us into her narrative. That does have its own kind of power.-Sarah Bernstein
She's definitely had a rough go of it, but also she doesn't see herself as somebody who is innocent. We also see her as a character who's abdicated this kind of moral responsibility in her own life.
So, for example, when she's transcribing the notes of the legal case that she's working on, she doesn't want to understand it because to understand it would mean that she would have to take some kind of moral position on it and she doesn't feel herself able to.
I was trying to think through and complicate this idea that in order to be somebody who bad things have happened to — we sort of expect people to be innocent, so for society to be like, 'Yes, something is bad, something bad has happened to that person, that's very wrong' — we also expect them to be this kind of paragon of virtue or moral purity.
I think that's really disturbing for any number of reasons because we're just people. We're not innocent.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
