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“If you enjoy page-turning tension, Bennett has succeeded wildly. . . Crisp and comfortable at the same time, the professionalism in his work lures one to the clean, ordered world of the very rich.”
Jonathan Bennett Jonathan Bennett's much anticipated 2008 novel, Entitlement, the story of a young man who becomes privy to secrets in a famously wealthy Canadian family, has a great deal to live up to.
Critical acclaim for Verandah People, a 2003 collection which convincingly equated the hostile bushland beyond home as a metaphor for madness in the Australian psyche, has gone so far as to suggest Bennett might have Chekhovian potential in the writing of short stories. Reminding us that Bennett is not interested in the usual route of poetry to novel-writing that most authors take, he then published a book of poems evocative of Australia in 2004, and now, Entitlement, entirely Canadian.
As a study of male friendship, the book shares a strong subtext with his first novel, After Battersea Park, published in 2001, but, as readers will soon find, this book is no revisitation of past work but rather a mature Bennett in his element with a theme. Masculinity, by this juncture, is considered synonymous with Bennett's writing. His sentences, like well-manicured men's fingernails, are clean, short, pragmatic.
The tenderness of his interactions between males, "At fifteen years old, on the dark winter shoreline of the lake, Colin mouthed to Andy the words, 'I love you,'" are freighted with the culture of male expectations.
Craft? Accomplished beyond craft, in interviews I have read, Bennett seems cynical of the term as a concept only relevant to beginning writers. Serious about his work, a matured Bennett lyrically flows with a message, his poetic voice never far.
Of course we search for the lurking danger of the jungle beyond our doors, and all the intimations it suggests, particularly when the opening scene is a Canadian backroad by a lake. Instead, by the first few paragraphs, we are confronted with somewhat crude Ontario colloquialisms, as authentic as any conversation along his Australian coastline and establishing Bennett as capable of being a Canadian with all the rough edges of the language intact.
The danger here, as fearsome and beautiful as a jungle, is in the psychological play between his characters. If you enjoy page-turning tension, Bennett has succeeded wildly.
The dialogue, written with no quotation marks bracketing conversation and the vivid descriptive for which Bennett is renowned, creates a sense of the experimental as well as a personal-journal intimacy.
Punctuating the aesthetic awareness that Bennett is a serious poet with an intention as to how we experience his work, we are pulled into the narrative of Entitlement.
Crisp and comfortable at the same time, the professionalism in his work lures one to the clean, ordered world of the very rich, where even vomiting, "Can stomach acid hurt pearls?" and murder, "No one knows I'm here she said in a plain voice. She looked down at her gloved hands," seem to arrive by a formal invitation, leaving us grateful that Bennett has chosen such complex villains and poignantly convincing moral characters to take part.
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