little scratch: Intense, visceral novel pushes the boundaries

little scratch

Author: Rebecca Watson

ISBN-13: 978-0571356584

Publisher: Faber

Guideline Price: £12.99

If good writing has the capacity to make the reader feel something, then Rebecca Watson’s debut novel certainly deserves to be praised. The reading experience is intense and visceral – through Watson’s inventive style and linguistic flair the reader may literally find themselves fighting the itch along with the book’s unnamed narrator, who goes about her day attempting not to scratch her body, or to at least ration the number of scratches she inflicts on herself.

Throughout little scratch, we can feel her desperation to self-harm, an impulse that initially seems to come directly from her body, not her rational mind. From the moment she wakes, to the monotonous hours of her day job as an assistant in a media company, to a night out on the town with her boyfriend, “my him”, the urge to scratch is always with her, “a fingernail’s gap pulling my tights down, letting my hands, flat, reach down to my ankles and up, behind my knees … sliding across the danger zone”.

To quote from the book like this does a disservice to the formal style employed by Watson on the page. Line breaks, blank spaces, time stamping in bold, fragmented passages and epeated words are just some of the ways the author arranges her text to convey the thoughts of her character. Underneath is a story of trauma and the strange ways in which a mind works to help a person through the darkest times.

To capture the hundreds of thousands of thoughts a person might have over a given day, and to mould them into a coherent novel, is a form of art

Tackling traumatic subject matter in a defiantly playful format, little scratch is a thought-provoking and original debut from a writer not afraid to push boundaries. If style is what makes an author distinctive, Watson will stand out among her peers for her experimentation with text and formatting.

The author sets out to show the interior world of her character over the course of a single day, every waking thought, from inconsequential asides to automatic responses, to the more troubled musings that underpin her speech and action. It is at once a simple and onerous task: the timespan is relatively easy to structure, but to capture the hundreds of thousands of thoughts a person might have over a given day, and to mould them into a coherent novel, is a form of art.

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Watson is a freelance arts writer who has been published in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and Granta. She graduated from the University of Oxford in 2016 and now works as the assistant arts editor at the Financial Times. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. In terms of the subject matter and stylistic inventiveness of her debut novel, comparisons can be made to fellow Faber author Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and also to Emma Glass's visceral debut Peach from 2018.

There is a Prufrock-esque quality to little scratch, with the banalities of the day – brushing teeth, WhatsApp notifications, riding the Tube – mixed with the momentous feelings lurking just below the surface. In what is perhaps a direct nod to Prufrock, Watson has her character eat an apricot, toss it half-eaten into a bin, only to miss: “(so close, really, to where it ought to be, that it isn’t too much fuss)”.

Most importantly of all, little scratch is a reminder that sexual violence – from catcalls to micro-aggressions to rape – is a commonplace problem for women

The style mirrors the refraction of the day, from the staccato narrative to the lower-case world of an ordinary life that has been turned upside down by an act of sexual violence. Watson chooses to write the bulk of her book, including the title, in the lower case, so that when we get to certain crisis points in the narrator’s day, their significance hits us just as they hit her: “STATISTICS yes good start OF RAPE IN WORKPLACE drumming fingers.”

As with any day, there are sporadic funny moments – a colleague whose name she can’t remember, the frustration of TripAdvisor reviews, the outwardly nonchalant but secretly frantic search for a good table in the staff canteen. And there are moments where we feel extraordinarily close to the narrator’s pain and sadness, as when she contemplates how to tell her boyfriend about the attack: “what if his eyes become pity, pity, pity and only pity”.

Most importantly of all, little scratch is a reminder that sexual violence – from catcalls to micro-aggressions to rape – is a commonplace problem for women. The desperate normality of it all is the alarming legacy of this clever, compelling book:

“a man says a certain sort of man that is, I can’t say for sure, can’t tell you how to know, just that you’ll know when you know, that it’s that sort of man, yes, when that sort of man says nice shoes he is not saying nice shoes he is saying I am itemising you.”