The Brooklyn Rail

They, the titular mother-daughter pair at the heart of Helle Helle’s latest novel, live in a candle-colored apartment above A Cut Above, a hair salon. The trash can full of hair is visible from their window, containing “at one point a complete pair of plaits.” They also live in a succession of other apartments, a single-family home, and a farmhouse. They are always moving. They don’t care for crocuses, but they like crosswords and cauliflower gratin—it is in pursuit of this last that the novel opens, with the daughter walking across a field bearing a giant cauliflower homeward. They are like this, mother and daughter, so close as to share opinions and preferences and certain ways of thinking.

But the mother is dying. “I must,” she remarks, “have swallowed a stone.” It is the daughter, masquerading as the mother on the phone with the doctors, who learns her prognosis first. While she’s on the phone:

Her mother bounds into the living room with two potatoes. She finds a telephone conversation taking place and beats a quiet retreat. Now the music changes, again her mother sings along. The doctors can relieve the symptoms, but the condition can’t be cured. Her school bag is dumped on the floor, she sits in front of it with her back to the rest of the room. Six months, perhaps a year. The dinner’s ready, they can eat now. They eat now.

Eventually, the mother has to go into the hospital, leaving the daughter on her own, though under the friendly if loose supervision of Palle, one of the many charming denizens of their small town (population 2,572). Her mother gives her money, but she decides to spend none of it, leading to what are surely some of the most lovely and loving descriptions of defrosting frozen food to exist in literature. She goes to school, she makes friends with a girl named Tove Dunk, a boy she calls Desert Boots, and others. She does, in other words, the things teenagers do: she rearranges the posters on her bedroom wall, tucks one away in the closet and, “while she’s there, she goes through her clothes. She no longer intends to wear overalls. She experiments with a high ponytail, packs her bag.” She sits at the back of class and “writes a list of things she wants to change about herself. Perhaps she’ll buy a secondhand peacoat, she considers taking up painting too.” She develops minor crushes and makes out with a few different boys in varying states of undress. Life continues in the face of death, in between visits to the hospital, and both are coming between mother and daughter, who never love each other any less but who, because of the separations wrought by illness and by the daughter’s growing up, are becoming more defined. At one point, a friend of the daughter throws a party and the theme keeps changing: first, everyone is to come as who they were, then who they dream of being, and finally, who they are. Many a child found their first costumes in their mother’s closet; the harder task is spending the rest of your life in costume as yourself.

they is equally attuned to mundanity and mortality, which are, perhaps, the same thing. It is a novel suffused with a daily grace, documenting the cozy details of mother and daughter’s life, the small pleasures of cheese toast and comfy clothes, and the way dread thrums alongside dailiness, each giving the other a different cast. “Nothing is the way it is,” the daughter reflects, but at the same time, the mother “takes out a notepad, writes: The days bring new experiences, good ones frequently too. A bit later she adds as a rule, but crosses it out again, she doesn’t care for the expression, replaces it with in general, inserts at least, swaps frequently for often, moves often.”

The pair like these kinds of language games. They do crossword puzzles in the hospital. The daughter “thinks about the word noun, whether it’s right. She still color-codes her parts of speech.” She wears out a second-hand thesaurus. She develops, at one point, “a wish to express herself in longer sentences,” a metapoetic wish, cutting against Helle’s spare prose. There’s an interesting tension, too, between the novel’s sense that mother and daughter are approaching the inevitable separations of adulthood and death—the mother’s prognosis giving the book the feeling of a clock ticking down—and the flattening tense of the writing. “This is last year,” we are told in the book’s first section, and even as the plot moves along, the prose is insistently present tense. The daughter can’t go downstairs for jam jars at night because “the bulb burns out yesterday,” the tire on her bike “punctures last year.” In one lovely paragraph, the mother:

thinks about wet weather, hail against a tent canvas. She’s lying on her back in bed. A downpour in a kitchen garden, potatoes awash.… It’s sixteen years ago. A brightening from the east, the baby in a bassinet on the garden table. She turns onto her stomach. When eventually she falls asleep she wakes up again after forty minutes every night. To begin with she staggers to the kitchen and puts some coffee on. This is back in February. She washes, even prepares a pork roast once. She stares at the black circles under her eyes every morning in the shop, reaches for her cloud concealer. One time she nearly snaps at a customer, it’s not like her at all. She says so into her pillow: ‘That’s not like me!’

It is now, which is last year, and sixteen years ago, and February, all at once. As the novel ends, the mother, home from the hospital for the time being—although any changes to her prognosis are unmentioned—requests cauliflower gratin for dinner. The daughter sets out over the fields in the morning to fetch a cauliflower, bringing us back to the beginning. The novel is its own self-contained loop, a perpetual present where no one grows up too quickly and no one dies.