Books
Jente Posthuma
People With No Charisma
Dutch writer Jente Posthuma’s first novel, People With No Charisma, was recently published in Australia. What I’d Rather Not Think About, her second, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and is described on the Booker website as “razor-sharp, deliberately laconic, and often absurdly funny”.
People With No Charisma is about an unnamed girl whose charismatic mother dies slowly of cancer in the living room, leaving the girl alone with her psychiatrist father. “In the months following my mother’s death,” says the girl, “my father and I would exchange only essential information.” Father and daughter avoid each other in the silent house, incapable of sharing their pain. If the girl’s distress does overflow, the father gives her advice; the sort of streamlined, industrial advice he gives to his patients. The characters come together to trade one-liners, replete with mutual incomprehension, and then go away again.
To borrow from James Wood: a genre is hardening. Writers wearing its shiny shell include Miranda July, Patricia Lockwood, Lauren Groff, Ottessa Moshfegh. The genre consists in short sentences, glittering with irony. The staccato syntax of The Internet. Declarative. Terse. Changing our lives 10 words at a time.
My impatience with this style rose to a screaming crescendo on the publication of Miranda July’s All Fours. I still can’t believe that damn book caused a revolution. Is middle-class discourse – this qualifying adjective is important; I might add white middle-class discourse – so impoverished that women like me need a smart-arse collection of beautifully formed sentences to tell us that we’re dissatisfied in a relationship? Apparently, it is.
People With No Charisma doesn’t have a plot. No, it does have a plot: it just doesn’t have a narrative. It’s written in a series of chapters or short stories, a chain of pools rather than a running stream, each treating a section of this painful life. The girl grows up and is maimed by depression. Isolated, broken, observant and witty, she eventually falls in love and has a baby. The baby is called Bob. Her partner loves her, and not just ironically. There is a kind of resolution with her father. The end.
People With No Charisma is accomplished – moving, even – but it’s not for me. I want to read a book that doesn’t avoid the difficulties of narrative by stopping when things get interesting, when genuinely essential things might get said.
Scribe, 176pp, $27.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 16, 2025 as "People With No Charisma".
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