HARD MOUTH

By Amanda Goldblatt

“It’s a thing now, isn’t it?” one character asks another in Amanda Goldblatt’s debut novel, “Hard Mouth.” “For a young woman … to go on a great adventure?” If it wasn’t already a thing, Denny, Goldblatt’s 20-something protagonist, makes it one. She escapes into the woods from Maryland, where she’s lived with grinding dread for the decade since her beloved father’s first cancer diagnosis. He’s just announced that his cancer is back for the third time, and he’s decided to forgo even more grueling treatment, “to let everything take its course.” The news severs the delicate and illusory coherence of Denny’s suburban universe.

A low-level employee at a research lab, Denny tends fruit flies “until their use had been spent” and they die. Living so close to the inevitable, Denny is torn between “making a home” at the lab and the inescapable feeling that “in the end I could not adhere” to its inhumanity. The self-division can be traced back to the novel’s opening scene: a memory in which Denny is 8 and her father hypnotizes her into a kind of self-splitting that grants her the power of objectivity. To this day she still wonders whether she is “permanently split, striated — like a cooled, fat-topped broth.”

Pop’s refusal of treatment highlights the nauseous stasis of her own life, so she proceeds to impulsively upend it. She frees the flies, renounces all her material possessions (cellphone included) and rents a lakeside cabin so remote it can only be reached by seaplane. She tells no one where she’s going — not even her best friend, Ken. Her departure feels as inevitable as the flies’ demise: “I thought no more of endings or beginnings. I knew I would leave now.”