Maggie Ross — The Gasteropod [1968]

Triumphant bagger of my alma mater’s fiction award, Edinburgh University’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1968, this sombre work concerns a deranged collector of shells whose unusual relationship with his menopause-bound wife Dorothea is revealed in slow, foreboding chapters throughout the course of the novel. The humourless flat first-person narrator and his exacting and meticulous descriptions of room interiors, his strained and bizarre relationships with his wife, her lover, and the other peculiar weirdoes that haunt their house in St. John’s Wood comprise the ‘story’, and the stylistic blandness on show is perfect at creating the mood of snail-like stasis required to prop the plot. The narrator, having married rich woman Dorothea, loses interest in his somewhat agoraphobic (she is never diagnosed thus) bride, leading her to take fashion designer Max into her house as a lover to make her tasteless dresses out of resentment while her husband tinkers with his shells. As Max plans to remove Dorothea from the airless mausoleum of their home, the narrator produces a series of unflattering photographs, showcasing Dorothea’s physical decline: a matter of sick-minded fascination to him. For sheer creepiness, this narrator is on a par with Misard in Zola’s La Bête Humaine, a rail worker who takes pleasure in the slow poisoning of his wife (although his motives are financial), however, this narrator has more aesthetic motives in mind (cash-flow not being an issue), and taunts Max with revealing shots of his aging bride. A slow-building and effective chiller that ruminates on the process of aging and the perils of shacking up with little creeps who collect shells and have no emotions. The author released her first novel in thirty years recently, The Villa Rouge, about Battle of Britain pilots and their marriages (more Sunday evening drama than adventurous avant-garde effort [Ross was featured in Giles Gordon’s Beyond the Words: Eleven Writers in Search of a New Fiction anthology alongside B.S. Johnson, Gabriel Josipovici and Ann Quin among others in 1975]). Seek this dark and sinister little wonder instead.

Editions:

1968, Hardback, Barrie & Rockliff: The Cresset Press.

1969, Hardback, Viking.

1970, Paperback, Penguin.

Bibliography:

Novels:

The Gasteropod, 1968, Barrie & Rockliff: The Cresset Press.

Milena, 1983, Harper Collins.

The Villa Rouge, 2015, MacLehose Press.