Isabel finds a piece of broken crockery in the garden. She washes it, recognizes the pattern, and checks the china in the house. Everything is where it should be.
That ought to be reassuring. Somehow, it is not.
The plates belonged to her mother's favorite set. Her mother has been dead for years, but the dishes remain behind glass, preserved rather than used. Isabel knows them well enough to be certain that nothing is missing. She checks anyway. A small piece of ceramic has unsettled an arrangement she thought she understood.
This is the opening of Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep, set in the Dutch countryside in 1961. Isabel lives alone in the family home. Her brothers have other lives. She has routines, things to look after, and very definite ideas about how a household should be kept.
Then her elder brother, Louis, makes an arrangement. He is going away for work; his girlfriend, Eva, will stay with Isabel. Isabel does not welcome the proposal. She has already met Eva, and once was quite enough.
There are ways to shut a person out at dinner
The early dinner that introduces Eva to the family is a good place to discover whether you like this novel's company. It is not a particularly nice place to be.
Eva tries to join in. Isabel takes in her appearance, her manner, and her uncertainty about the menu. Every awkwardness becomes available as evidence against her. The reader can feel a group establishing the terms on which an outsider is allowed to speak, without anybody having to declare the terms.
You may recognize the atmosphere even if you have never shared a table with people quite like these. Somebody says too much. Somebody else lets a remark fall into silence. The conversation belongs to those who already know how to conduct it, and the newcomer keeps discovering rules by breaking them.
Isabel can make hostility sound like a question of taste. A correction seems modest; a disapproving look need not be explained. But a series of small judgments can decide whether another person receives any patience at all.
The effect is uncomfortable and funny. Our knowledge of how difficult Eva finds the evening does not prevent us from noticing her awkwardness. We may even share Isabel's irritation before remembering whose view has given the irritation its shape.
That need not mean the novel asks us to like Isabel, or to dislike her conclusively. Her relationships with her brothers complicate the first impression. She can depend on someone whose wishes she scarcely knows how to hear.
In the opening chapter available through the Booker Prizes, her younger brother, Hendrik, is considering accompanying his partner, Sebastian, to France. Isabel finds it easier to turn the conversation toward her own concerns than to answer what he is trying to tell her. A person who notices every discourtesy in a stranger can miss a request from someone close.
Her attachment to Hendrik makes the coldness more intelligible without making it less cold. She does not want to lose his company. Admitting that need would require an openness she finds difficult; dismissiveness is easier to reach for.
This is one reason an unappealing central character can be worth following. We can want to know more without agreeing to excuse her. Eva's discomfort does not become less real because Isabel is lonely. Both people remain in the room.
Keeping the house is not the same as deciding its future
It is easy to mistake Isabel's familiarity with the house for secure possession of it. She has stayed, maintained its routines, and kept track of its objects. Surely she can decide what happens there.
The family arrangement is different. As Julie R. Enszer's Jewish Book Council review explains, the uncle owns the house, which is intended for Louis when he marries. Isabel's care has not made its future hers to determine.
Eva's visit therefore introduces more than an irritating guest. As Louis's girlfriend, she is associated with a possible future of the house in which Isabel may no longer occupy her present place. Louis can announce the visit and depart. Isabel is left to experience it, breakfast after breakfast.
The imbalance gives the small domestic rules another weight. Here is a woman who can insist on where a plate belongs while lacking comparable authority over where she will belong. Counting and preserving may offer a narrow kind of security.
It would be too easy, though, to use that insight as a master key to her character. Insecurity does not explain away what she does with the authority she has. Her suspicions fall on Neelke, the maid. One person's unease can become another person's working conditions.
The novel's domestic scale makes that visible. Power does not have to arrive as a grand announcement. It can take the form of whose account of a missing object will be accepted, who gets questioned, and who is expected to remain polite through the questioning.
There is tenderness in keeping a dead parent's things. Objects hold habits of touch and recollection; a room can retain a familiar shape after the person who gave it that shape has gone. We need to recognize this tenderness to understand why disturbing an arrangement can feel so much larger than moving an object.
But what happens when nothing may be touched? The things have survived, while living among them becomes increasingly difficult. Care for a house can turn into an obligation to prevent anything new from happening in it.
In her Booker interview, van der Wouden identifies homes and the imagined security of owning one among her interests. The house is consequently more than an atmospheric container. Who stays, who leaves, and who makes the arrangements are active parts of the story.
The question does not require a historical lesson before we can feel it. Many families contain someone who has done the work for years but is not the person whose decision counts. The grievance is recognizable. What Isabel does with hers remains an open question.
Dislike is an exhausting form of attention
A person you meet once can be put out of mind. A person who moves into your house keeps appearing.
Eva's different habits interrupt Isabel's day. A sound in the house, an altered routine, or a touched object can keep the guest present even when she is out of sight. As small items seem to disappear, suspicion has something more definite on which to fasten.
For now, suspicion is the important word. We are being invited into Isabel's vigilance, not handed proof that her interpretation is right.
Shared rooms make that vigilance bodily. Summer has a temperature. Another person moves at a different pace and occupies space differently. Before Isabel has arrived at a useful explanation of her feelings, she is already responding to the fact of Eva nearby.
Van der Wouden's Booker conversation also names the relation between repulsion and desire as a starting interest. The change is part of the novel's publicly described premise, but there is a difference between knowing its direction and experiencing the adjustments that make it possible.
A glance does not have to announce itself as a turning point. The same gesture can become harder to interpret. Irritation may continue even as it ceases to account for all the attention being paid.
That offers a more interesting prospect than a simple conversion from a hostile woman to a loving one. Isabel's existing habits of judgment are also habits of self-protection. Wanting something she does not know how to want can unsettle her before it helps her understand anything.
The book includes explicit sexual writing. Readers expecting an entirely restrained country-house mystery should know that bodies and desire occupy real space here. Intimacy is not merely implied and then discreetly removed from view.
At the same time, desire does not make Eva transparent. To want someone is not to acquire their account of themselves. Even a change from hostility to attraction can leave the other person serving as an answer to our own needs.
That distinction is worth carrying into the house. We know relatively little about Eva at the beginning. Isabel's scrutiny is intense, but intensity and accuracy are not the same thing.
Let the rooms become ordinary first
The Safekeep combines the pressure of a psychological story with the pull of a mystery. Enszer notes its affinity with midcentury lesbian pulp fiction: the closeness of desire and unease, the charged household in which familiar rooms become difficult to inhabit.
The opening nevertheless asks for patience with ordinary encounters. A dinner can take time. So can a visit in which people keep failing to say what they mean. If you want a fresh clue at the end of every short chapter, the first pages may not supply the pace you expect.
The pleasure lies partly in how much happens inside these apparently small scenes. A refusal to answer changes the balance of a conversation. A new subject allows someone to evade a request. Courtesy remains on the surface while a relationship shifts underneath it.
Nor must every object immediately become a clue. Before we ask what the china will turn out to mean, it matters that Isabel spends her days caring about it. Otherwise the house would be a puzzle box rather than somewhere people have lived.
The year matters, too: 1961. The war has ended, but an end to fighting does not decide what people remember, discuss, or leave unexplained. The publisher signals that this past will enter the story. Its particular route belongs to the novel, and there is no need to reveal it before a reader has met the household.
For now, Isabel has a broken piece of crockery and an unwanted guest. She is watching for what Eva might touch. We can begin by watching how she watches, and listening for the moment when a rule that seemed self-evident no longer sounds quite the same.