Language and Form in While Visiting Babette

Devyn Andrews

Book Review

A review of Kat Meads’ While Visiting Babette (Sagging Meniscus Press). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.

Kat Meads, Featured Writer of L’Esprit Issue Five, also spoke with the journal.

Much as gazing out a window requires one look through, not at, the glass between, reading a book requires us to see beyond the visual and syntactical arrangement of words on the page. The interface becomes translucent, distance appears to collapse; that perception nonetheless always occurs through a kind of frame is perhaps its ultimate illusion, evidence of that strange and subjective entanglement between the individual and her environment which we call consciousness.

Of course, usually it is far more effective to enact a concept than to wax poetically upon it. And in her latest novella, While Visiting Babette, Kat Meads minces no words. Picking up appropriately in medias res, the story follows Ina, who finds herself indefinitely institutionalized after a visit to the facility to see her cousin Babette goes awry. In just over 100 pages, Mead’s lean but energetic story forgoes both extraneous plot detail and subjective self-reflection in favor of keen, outward-facing observation. Attuning her reader not to the specifics of Ina’s character or history but instead to the way Ina perceives and attempts to define the world through the constraints of her reality, Mead explores the fundamental instability of self and sense, ultimately offering narrative as a space for stabilization.

Written in third person from Ina’s perspective, and temporally bounded by Ina’s time with Babette in the women’s facility, most of the story transpires over quick scenes from their day-to-day lives. Meads, in a few powerful strokes, renders a vivid sense of the kind of behavioral setting in which the women find themselves committed—one of noise and chaos on one hand, and enforcement of order on the other: “Someone whose room was closer to the stairway had been banging her dinner tray like a drum but then another someone had taken the tray away.” While Visiting Babette is largely propelled by Meads’ skillfully deployed powers of suggestion; no explanation is offered for the women’s institutionalization, nor is the work interested in taking up this thematic work as its mantle. By stripping exposition and subverting conventional narrative expectations (exposition, backstory, extra-narrative histories) Meads evokes a sense of defamiliarization in her reader which runs parallel to the central conflict Ina faces, including how to define the boundaries of the self, and how to make sense of an ever-shifting reality.

While Visiting Babette is overtly in conversation with Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and, more directly, its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. While these intertextual references are conspicuous (we first meet Ina when she is running late; a pair of strange twins put on performances at the facility; and the Queen of Hearts makes a notable appearance in a card deck, among others), Meads builds upon, rather than repurposes, this narrative scaffolding. While Carroll’s work offers the mirror as the transitional point between Alice’s fictive world and world of inverses, Meads’ analog is the window; early on, the reader learns of Ina’s persistent fear of windows, which, at the facility, are also reinforced by bars: 

The window in her room here was taller than she was and could not be covered even if Ina somehow scrounged enough material to do so. It was a rule. No covered windows. Ina, like every resident, had to leave her room during the inside window-washing sessions but was allowed to watch the outside window washers go about their business, turning and twisting their implements to get between the bars. Now and again one of the workers would knock a pail off the platform or drop the squeegee. Should it start to sprinkle, the outside window washers labored on, hoping, Ina supposed, that the sprinkle belonged to a sun shower rather than presaged a coming deluge. As of yet, none of the outside window washers had stopped their washing to stare between the bars and through the window at her. Should that happen, Ina planned to wave in a nonchalant, calm and friendly fashion and perhaps to mouth “hello.”

Ina’s fear of windows is explored alongside her relative lack of agency throughout the novella. One gets the sense that Ina’s anxiety is in some ways rooted to the permeability of the window, and parallels her sense of self-conception; while she is comfortable with being perceived, it seems that her anxiety comes from the idea that what lays beyond the glass requires from her a kind of response, a looking back. Ina’s troubles with self are brought into stark relief by Babette’s confident self-assurance, and the two are rendered as opposites throughout the story, both in a physical and in psychological sense—at one point, Ina notices that she herself is “shrinking and Babette expanding.” Where Ina is hesitant, Babette is sure-footed, and where Ina falters Babette picks up the slack. Babette is even able to read Ina’s thoughts, and a few wonderfully playful exchanges between the two sometimes take place partly in dialogue, partly in Ina’s interiority: 

“People are who they are, Ina.”

No, Ina thought.

“Yes,” Babette said.

Not always, Ina thought.

“More often than not,” Babette said.

The result is that Meads’ book privileges the associative movement of language while experimenting with the novel(la) form, such as it exists. Like Carroll’s work, While Visiting Babette works by drawing our attention to language and rendering it, at times, nonsensical: “She had not yet learned to accept a story that was a play or a play that was a story.” But in the absence of conventional plot, there are no convenient metaphors or allegories to parse; the resulting experience for the reader, who cannot help but look for order in the noise, is a state of uncertainty which, though unsettling, is nevertheless true of life and the search for sense, products of the demarcation of self and other that inherently comes with observing, understanding, and shaping one’s reality—through, as it were, that dark mirror of language.

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While Visiting Babette

Kat Meads

Sagging Meniscus Press

$18

114pp

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Devyn Andrews lives in Chicago and is a graduate of the UIC Program for Writers. She is a Prose Reader for West Trade Review, where she also contirubes book reviews. Her work has further appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Cutthroat Magazine, Memezine, and elsewhere.