Bennion, “Spin” (Reviewed by Eric W. Jepson)

Title: Spin
Author: John Bennion
Publisher: BCC Press
Genre: Novel
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 470
ISBN: 978-1948218535

Reviewed by Eric W. Jepson

This was the third of three books I ordered on April 6 (!) and when it arrived I was stunned by how long it was. I was expecting a slim lil volume and it was not that. Heike’s Void was longer than I expected but Spin was, like a dozen Hemingways in Paradise!

I figured it was entering the realm of Books I Own But Who Knows If or When I’ll Ever Read Them. But I was intrigued by the concept and it kept staring at me from the shelf and it felt paired to Heikie‘s, which I had loved, so one Sunday afternoon I stood from the couch and took it down. Glad I did.

I’m a little hesitant to talk about the novel as most of what I want to say will sound like the sort of stuff that might keep me from reading it, had I known ahead of time. So be warned of spoilers—not spoilers of plot! but spoilers of theme and tone and form and narration.

The “concept” I referred to above was that the main character’s daughter is taken from her in a divorce. She grabs her and runs off and manages to stay ahead of her pursuit by delegating her decisions to an “executive decision maker.”

On page 48—much later than I would have expected from, say, Vonnegut (as in Slaughterhouse-Five or Timequake)—Bennion steps out from behind the curtain and just starts talking to us with no warning about swimming in the faculty pool and imagining being a pregnant woman. It’s startling. Then he’s back to the story.

It takes a few of these visits before we can figure out what he’s up to.

And what he’s up to is plural, but I only wish to discuss one.

Bennion has broken fiction in a manner I never imagined it could be broken.

He tells us that his heroine’s journey isn’t just fictionally determined randomly. No, the author himself is using random methods to determine what happens to her next.

I never realized how much, in fiction, we count on the guiding hand of the author, that such a hand exists, to convince us to keep reading. We trust the author. And John Bennion has rejected that stewardship.

It made for a disorienting experience. It made me wonder if the book I’d picked off the new shelf at the library, read chunks from, then tossed away in anger and disgust, was right: storytelling, fiction—these things are terrible and we should just stop. Spin made me question the entire enterprise of fiction.

But as his intrusions into the text become longer and more frequent, we entered on a journey with him, discussing how much responsibility writers even deserve.

And thus, I believe, we come to the title’s primary meaning—not spin as in the tool poor Lily uses to design her life, but spin as in doctors. Bennion explores is own politics and artistry and feelings and wonders how well he is doing expanding beyond all the privileges he has inherited to really imagine the Other.

En route, he quotes numerous thinkers (especially Levinas). And, perhaps, presents an argument against the fiction-hater whose book I still intend to leave at the library.

I rush to assure you that this second layer of the book (the essaying, he calls it) does not prevent the fiction from working. This film gave me one of the most upsetting moments I’ve had in some time as well as some successful thrills. The oppression Lily undergoes in this book, the powerlessness, is heavy. And the book supplies no easy wins in the end. It may turn out well, but it’ll take thirty years.

Let’s also point out that the Lily-drawn illustrations (actually by daughter Amy Bennion) are excellent and thought-provoking and mysterious. We don’t know what they are until near the end of the novel, not long after a long gap without any at all.