Vivid Sensory Details Inform Tale of a Fleeing Woman

The least substantial things in French writer Marie Darrieussecq’s novel “Undercurrents” are its characters and plot. The story, such as it is, involves a woman who empties her and her husband’s joint bank account and takes off with their young daughter for a seaside town in Spain. The husband hires a detective to track them down. It is not clear why the woman fled, how her husband felt on discovering her flight or what the little girl feels about either parent. In fact, we are not even told their names, although we do learn the name of a young man who gives the child swimming lessons.

The narrative shifts so seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, from one character to another, that the casual reader might not even register the points at which the “she” or “he” whose actions and perceptions are being described is no longer the mother but the child, no longer the child but its grandmother, no longer the swimming instructor but the detective.

If the characters are deliberately indistinct, almost featureless, the setting--landscape, townscape and, most of all, seascape--pulsates with life. Viewed in the vast context of the natural and man-made worlds--weather, buildings, beaches and ocean--the people seem almost like stick figures, generic rather than individual. And certainly, their minds are full of their immediate surroundings. The child may wonder what’s become of her father, but spends more time absorbing her seaside milieu:

“Before her mother sent her off to bed she saw the weather map on TV, those big curled-up masses whirring away at the slopes of the Earth. She awakened to a dark and windy night. . . . Something like a residue of sun remains, red and scattered under the black sky. . . . The fluorescent sea seems to have absorbed the day’s energy to melt it into shining, lacquered waves. The sea rises and falls, slowly, without haste, strong in its mass, full of octopuses, whales, hurricanes, shipwrecks, bestowing on the city the edge of its presence. It makes her feel grownup to be here. . .”

Indeed, the simplest detail of the daily life of the senses seems to have more quiddity than the underlying situation. Yet these sensory details also signify. Darrieussecq’s brilliant description of the little girl’s difficulty in swallowing an egg sandwich not only bespeaks the child’s anxiety and panic, but also points to the mother’s neglect of her needs: “The eggs form a dry paste on her tongue: the white--smooth--and the yolk--earthy--mix together as they stick to the roof of her mouth; saliva isn’t flowing quickly enough, it’s as if egg, egg paste, is what her mouth is secreting now. . . . it seems her mother didn’t think to bring along any water.”

Darrieussecq’s vivid renderings of sights, sounds, tastes and textures convey the immediacy of her characters’ experiences. Consigned to the distant background are any moral, social or psychological dilemmas that may attend on grabbing one’s child and taking off without a word to one’s spouse.

The reality of the present all but eclipses memories of the past and concern for the future, leaving the characters genuinely dazed: intensely aware, yet unable to see in perspective. Bite-size chunks of natural history about ocean tides, sea turtles, hibernating bears, geological formations and dinosaurs, all fascinating in themselves, extend this dazzlement.

From the opening page, where the ocean is depicted as an enormous breathing mouth, the reader is plunged into a world of unaccustomed, yet oddly recognizable perspectives. Mental states become indistinguishable from atmosphere, and the reader may well become spellbound, both by Darrieussecq’s poetic prose (translated from the French with remarkable skill by Linda Coverdale) and her unique way of seeing things.

This passage, in which the careless, easily irritated mother suddenly fears her child may have wandered off, conveys some sense of the novel’s peculiar magic: “She thought, in the forest, that she’d lost her. She was only going to look at the sea, climb the dune and look at the sea. She returned; the tent was empty. Branches sliced through the darkness. The forest surrounded her. The sand fell away in shadow, quickly, beneath her steps. And then she saw her, an elf, through the black boles. She caught her, that fragile little body ready to melt in the night air, to dissolve in the surge of the forest; thought of swallowing her, reclaiming her; making her go back inside her womb, placing her arms inside her arms, her belly inside her belly, her head inside her skull.” In place of psychology, morality, insight or social criticism, Darrieussecq has given us a mesmerizing world of sensations and impressions.