![]() Reid's narrator back-burners her momentary misgivings about Jake, going deeper into his ominous world, imagining that she'll end it when the right moment presents itself. It calls to mind Gavin de Becker's book, The Gift of Fear, which discusses the way people, particularly women, often resist their fear instinct, acting in spite of it to their disadvantage. Even as Jake leads her on a tour of his family farm – where she sees dead sheep stacked like old newspapers – she continues to follow him. ![]() Doubly interesting is the way that the narrator's gaze is turned upon the male, who, through her eyes, seems both shady and grotesque. In these descriptions, Reid's authorial empathy is remarkable. Now she is an adult, resisting and desiring intimacy with this man she seems suspicious of right from page one. Here is a woman who has been frightened of men – however innocuously – since she was a girl. Perhaps this is the feature of Reid's storytelling that stuck with me the most. Paranoia informs all of her observations she is dogged by it. "The man is always there," notes the narrator, projecting the memory of a childhood Peeping Tom onto strangers and non-strangers alike, including Jake. Reid is particularly good at capturing the danger that often shadows female identity. We see the mise-en-scène through her eyes, and over the course of the novel, the gaze skews progressively scarier. "What cues us that something is not innocent?" In these questions, Reid deftly projects a miasma of threat onto nearly every thought that passes through the narrator's head. "How do we know when something is menacing," she asks, her mind wandering to-and-from thoughts of her impending breakup. In that space, fears – both rational and not – begin to bleed in. Within the car, the mental and emotional chasm between the couple is enormous. She creates a vivid portrait of Jake to the exclusion of revealing much about herself beyond a few brief anecdotes, which add up primarily to unsettling encounters with men. Yet even in her profound state of doubt, she remains captivated by Jake – not just his thoughts and opinions, but by the way he chews, the way he drives, the way he wraps up two headache tablets in a tiny Kleenex-and-tape sachet. Ever the cruciverbalist, Jake is cryptic to a fault, or is at least presented as such while "she" assesses his character on a macro scale. ![]() The real sense of mystery plays out in the mind game between Jake and the narrator.įrom the outset, Reid kindles the uncomfortable feeling that we are being initiated into a puzzle that won't be so easily uncrossed. As a tactic, it's inappreciably diverting. ![]() Interspersed between their chapters are fragments of unattributed dialogue, conversations between anonymous characters after what sounds like a grisly event. In spite of the occasionally rigid dialogue, Jake and the narrator are attention-gripping, their connection to each other both curious and consistently alarming. Having published two works of non-fiction previously, One Bird's Choice and The Truth About Luck, Reid's ear for memoir reveals itself in the voices of the characters, whose thoughts and conversational style verge on essayistic. The style is unerringly lucid, if also a little ordinary. But only when alone can we focus on ourselves, know ourselves." She wants to be alone, an idea that Reid jacks up to its most hyperbolic expression – true aloneness having no discernible endpoint. It's a belief we want to be true," she thinks. The question that Reid pursues isn't why, but rather, why not? "The idea that we are better off with one person for the rest of our lives is not an innate truth of existence. She is, fascinatingly, a woman who seems to understand herself best outside the company of others. Over beers and banter, he identifies himself as a cruciverbalist: a maker of crossword puzzles – a word she learns the meaning of once they've parted. "Ending things" is on her mind from the very first line, and the premise seems to grow in urgency even as she takes us backward and forward in time from a childhood memory of a man staring into her bedroom window to her meet-cute six weeks earlier with Jake at a pub trivia night. Spanning one afternoon and night, I'm Thinking of Ending Things lives in the first-person thoughts of a young, aggressively unnamed woman, riding shotgun as her boyfriend Jake ferries them to his family farm. Iain Reid's smart debut novel, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, interrogates the promise of the grand finale, delivering a stark, cerebral thriller that crushes what (and who) you thought you knew under the weight of its own ending. Conclusions are treasures (even the painful ones) that we can look back on and see ourselves framed on either side of. Abandoning a relationship, a job, even a house – all of these things count towards change and advance within the stories we make of our lives. Experience often earns its meaning when an end is in sight.
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