Review: Liminal - Jordan Tannahill

Genre: Literary Memoir Published: House of Anansi Press, January 2018

My Rating: 3/5 stars

"In this moment, I am that hulking computer filling the room with my burning incomprehension, unable to reconcile the impossible equation of your body divided by infinity."

Part personal memoir, part philosophical essays and musings on life in general, this might be one of the most marmite-books I read all year. For as far as there’s a story here at all, it takes place over the course of seconds as our narrator checks on his sleeping mother. Her eyes are closed, her mouth agape, and in that split second before he approaches her he cannot tell if she is alive or dead. She is caught in a liminal state – “Schrodinger’s mom”, if you will - until he touches her and confirms the truth either way.

Inspired by this striking sense of liminality, Tannahill explores memories, musings and questions about what it means to be alive, to be a body and to be conscious.

The title describes the content of this book perfectly; everything, including my feelings about it, is liminal. It’s somewhere between fiction and memoir, between essays and longform, between smart and observing and desperately self-absorbed and indulgent. Its themes are far too broad in scope, and yet this book contains ultimately far too little substance to sustain it for 300 pages.

I can see why people either love or hate this book, and I’m balancing on that fence myself too. I like a bit of philosophical revery every now and then, and I especially love the themes of body, queerness and othering that the author covers. I liked the commentary on theatre and the presence of actual world events (from the twin-towers to the Trump election, to the COVID-pandemic) as almost abstract shadow puppets merged into the backdrop.

Simultaneously I can’t help feeling like this went on for far too long and became far too repetitive in the process. To me, the perfect length to explore this material would’ve been about novella-length (100 pages or so). There are great themes and keen observations in here, and with a strict editor, I think this novel could’ve been far more powerful than it was in its current form.

It’s not easy to think of an accurate comp-title for this one… Imagine the “between-fiction-and-non-fiction-style” of authors like SSheila Heti or Doireann Ní Ghríofa with the thematic exploration of theatre and body from Anna Moschovakis' An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth, and sprinkle the whole thing in unapologetic queerness. This is either your bag, or it is not.

I for one am interested enough by the boldness of the ideas and style to check out more by the author.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.