Lisa Harding’s third novel, The Wildelings, is set in a fictionalised Trinity College of the 1990s. Jessica and Linda – childhood best friends with a complicated dynamic – become embroiled in new relationships at Wilde University that teach them hard lessons about obsession, desire, abuse and power.
The novel is told from Jessica’s perspective across two timelines: in the present day she is discussing the traumatic events with a therapist who encourages her to write down everything that happened in chronological order. This written account of her Wilde days is where the story is most alive, energised and compelling.
The artifice of the therapist’s office scenes, however, disrupts the narrative flow and asks the reader to suspend too much disbelief as regards the plausibility of that construct. Memory does not unspool neatly like this. The reader is immersed in the dream-like surrealism, and high drama, of the 1990s before being interrupted by the therapist asking a question of Jessica as if she too is reading it in real time. With this device, the aim may have been deliberate absurdity, to underscore the character’s philosophical quest to derive meaning from the past, but the execution nonetheless takes away more than it adds.
Perhaps this framing was borne out of an anxiety that readers would struggle to feel empathy for Jessica – who, although drawn with great psychological acuity and depth, will inevitably be judged on her likeability. This problematic response from readers who struggle to engage or connect with flawed, and therefore human, women characters is an ongoing battle in publishing.
Harding’s previous novels have demonstrated also that she is unafraid to write complex, contradictory, nonconforming women who are authentic products of their past hurts. This is to her great credit, and yet, placing her protagonist in a therapist’s office where she must explain her behaviour may betray an anxiety that readers will struggle to understand Jessica without this exposition.
Harding’s publisher is marketing this novel as one for fans of The Secret History by the Pulitzer Prize winner Donna Tartt. As in life, comparison is the thief of joy, and so they do Harding a disservice here by creating that expectation. Fans of Harding’s previous novels, however, will not be disappointed as this novel is an excellent illustration of the writerly sensibilities that have won her past acclaim.
