Since the Accident: Jen Craig’s hilariously entertaining shaggy dog tale about two sisters’ lifelong struggle to escape their mother’s shadow

The first shaggy dog tale, some say, went like this: An aristocratic London family, distraught at the loss of their dog, advertised in The Times. On spotting the advertisement, an American decided a shaggy dog found in his home town answered the description, and brought the dog by ship across the Atlantic. He was received at the aristocrats’ front door by the family butler, who declared “Oh not that shaggy, sir”, and shut the door in the man’s face.

Whether or not this is truly the first shaggy dog tale, the form is now generally agreed to feature a long and wandering narrative leading to an anticlimactic conclusion. In effect, a shaggy dog tale is a joke at the listener’s expense. You seriously thought I was going to meet your expectations? the teller seems to be saying. It’s a form of slapstick in which the listener cops the slap.

 Superficially, the plot of Since the Accident concerns a woman’s wish to “become an artist“. The woman’s detailed, self-involved account of how she succeeded in doing just this (if only fleetingly) occupies much of the story’s foreground, but Craig’s real theme here is not how to become an artist, but rather how psychologically difficult it can be to escape from the shadow of a wilfully and persistently meddlesome parent (in this case, a mother).

Craig’s story starts out po-faced enough. Writing what we later learn is an entry in a personal journal, the unnamed female narrator tells how, having returned to Australia after a decade’s absence, she succumbs to her mother’s urging and goes to visit her older sister Trude. Trude is significantly physically handicapped following a road accident that occurred some months previously. To her mother’s horror, Trude has recently split up with the nice physiotherapist who befriended her after that accident, and has taken up residence in a suburban Sydney pub, where, by her own account, she is currently “getting back into her art“. As Trude is keen to explain to her sister, this business of getting back into her art is a particularly challenging proposition, psychologically, given that their mother, whom they both see as an intrusive so-and-so, has been encouraging Trude to do exactly this ever since the accident.

As we will soon discover, Trude turns out to be a preposterously self-absorbed monologist of the take-no-prisoner variety, and before we know it, she is dragging her younger sister (and us) through all kinds of seemingly irrelevant minutiae concerning how she came to be enrolled in a Getaway Art Workshop in rural northern New South Wales, what a lot of arty-farty tom-foolery that turned out to be — and then how, in the wake of a (literal) sliding door moment following the workshop, she was finally able to enter, if only momentarily, into the blessed state of “being an artist“.

Craig clearly is interested in the predicament of the wanna-be artist striving for some kind of hoped-for breakthrough — Since The Accident and Craig’s second novel, Panthers and the Museum of Fire share this theme in common — but the real key to understanding Since the Accident lies in the dynamic between the two sisters and the woman the narrator archly persists in referring to as our mother.

In the course of the novel, we hear a number of anecdotes about our mother which clearly signify to the narrator, at least, that this woman has been an absolute horror when it comes to interfering in her daughters’ lives. The daughters, however, have clearly developed some pretty strong counter-measures for dealing with the threat, real or perceived, that our mother represents.

At the most basic level, these have included physical avoidance — the narrator has just spent the last ten years of her life on the other side of the world — and open defiance, as evidenced by Trude’s recent decision to split up with her physiotherapist/partner (a man of whom her mother approved) and to move into a rancid-smelling suburban pub, the kind of place of which, the narrator tells us, “(o)ur mother has a horror… Even today, our mother thought, the best and most modern disinfectants wouldn’t be able to remove the tuberculosis-infected spittle that would have been aimed at the tiles near the entrance of such places“.

It’s inside the minds of the daughters, however, that the most important battle with the meddlesome mother must be played out, because it’s inside these minds that this figure has most insidiously set herself up in business. “Even my resistance to her work of replacing my self with her self only succeeded more effectively in allowing my self to be replaced with her self… There has been no way I have ever been able to effect an escape from this role of both being the right-hand woman of our mother and having my self replaced by her self.” It’s in her depiction of this struggle is played out in practice that Craig really shines.

Both sisters present themselves as pursuing lofty, noble goals of a quite different order from those pursued by their small-minded mother. The narrator wants to work out how to live, how to take herself seriously and grow into her own importance. She wants to address the problem of her inner disconnection by gathering in herself. The narrator’s sister Trude wants “to produce art that at last expressed what she had always hoped to be able to express“. She wants to “be an artist“.

In pursuit of such high-blown aspirations, each of the sisters has adopted an air of ironic detachment, of cool and knowing aloofness, that Craig captures brilliantly.

Trude’s pose of all-knowing cynicism is often downright hilarious. Describing one particular participant in an art workshop, Trude remarks that “at no time was she (ie, Trude) ever taken in by the way that this woman turned her head this way and that“. She describes a minibus driver as having “that look of someone who had been around for a bit and knew everything there was to know and, in the face of this knowledge, had no qualms about driving a minibus” — oh, that look, this literal-minded reader wanted to mouth —  while another man (not actually a sports teacher) is alleged to have “that look that sports teachers give other sports teachers who interrupt a good rant“. You know that look, right? A man who fiddles with a door after closing it shows himself, in Trude’s eyes, to be “busy with the door in the way of someone who sees their whole existence as a series of similar small acts of completion“. Trude imagines her mother attempting to set her up with a man who owns “good ordinary things” like a “four-door Holden Barina hatchback with (a) box of white tissues on the back seat” — but the mere thought of such a man is enough to “make her think of inert matter at the bottom of a saucepan: custard, porridge, overcooked pasta, and all of it gone cold and therefore uneaten.”

Trude lobs these insights into her sister’s direction in a spirit of heady, ecstatic solipsism, never meeting her sister’s gaze, yet making great demands on her attention as she doggedly (sorry!) pursues a seemingly endless narrative, whose ultimate point appears to recede ever further with the drawing of each breath.

It’s all a very odd performance, seemingly, but the deadly stabs of wit, and the relentless monologue they punctuate, do perhaps make better sense if we read them as ways of keeping a powerfully interfering internal voice at bay — that is to say, of silencing our mother.

Trude’s younger sister, the novel’s narrator, tends to present herself as someone who speaks more earnestly and plainly than Trude, but even her narratorial voice at times takes on an I’ve-blocked-my-ears-and-nothing-you-say-can-possibly-reach-me quality. In the following passage, I’ve drawn attention to words or phrases the narrator picks up and repeats, either exactly or in slight paraphrase, creating a somewhat fugue-like effect:

… and yet, I reflected near the windows of Trude’s balcony doors, I was also aware that all through my life there have been many times when I have been convinced that I had only just worked out how I needed to live. At the point of realising that I have at last discovered how I needed to live, I have always thought of the various factors that have led up to the moment of realising this: those factors taking shape in my brain in a series of stills. There is a particular still, for example, of myself in a plane slowly landing in Singapore airport. In this still, it is night and the night spreads wide beyond the bubble-clear windows of the plane. The plane is tilting and so it seems that the runway and the city, lit up by countless points of light, arranged in lines and building shapes, are tilting. All there exists in this first country beyond Australia that I have seen is a tilting of light points that stretch outwards into infinity. This still — an image of otherness, as of something being dipped in a large cold pool — this still, I now realised, is usually the first of a series of like images which I invariably bring out for any realisation that I have only now worked out how I needed to live.

The impression here is of someone listening intently to her own voice, and hoping, by repeating specific words and phrases, to convince herself of their veracity. (If that sounds far-fetched, try reading the same passage, but instead of repeating the words and phrases underlined when the narrator does, try substituting words and phrases with similar meanings. The effect is very different.) This quite distinctive, perseverative form of utterance also sounds to me like a way of blocking out an unwelcome internal voice that is continually seeling to challenge or contradict one’s own.

Craig’s premise in Since The Accident appears to be that if one is forced to live in the shadows of a domineering parent, the only mode of life that is viable in practice is to make a kind of shaggy dog of oneself, endlessly procrastinating and deferring (with all the wit and ironic charm at one’s disposal) an ending that must inevitably disappoint others, including, of course, the dominating parent.

Who ultimately wins when that is the result, I wonder?

Since The Accident is certainly an odd novel. Its oddness, though, is not without precedent (I am particularly reminded of the works of Thomas Bernhard), and its rewards are many. I understand Since the Accident is likely to be republished soon. When it is, do check it out.

December 2022