Whispers Through a Megaphone by Rachel Elliott

Adding makes you feel like a person with clear intentions, subtracting feels like a small victory.” “But lists are good, remember? You can add things and take them away. Both are lovers of order – Ralph feels compelled to “tidy up” the abandoned shack in the woods that he stumbles across Miriam obsessively cleans her home and makes lists. Ralph and Miriam, two total strangers who are both bystanders in their own lives, suddenly form a friendship in a time of great transformation and discovery. When Miriam first meets Ralph, he is a disheveled mess who has just bolted from his life to hide in the woods, yet Miriam “know just from looking at him that no degree of unkemptness will ever destroy his neatness, because it burns inside him, relentless.” He is “perpetually bewildered” and seems to lack any sense of intention or agency when it comes to his life. Ralph, on the other hand, is in the world but not necessarily of the world. “er default personality setting is melancholy infused with kindness, which sounds like a room spray for introverts.”

Suspecting that she “wears her reticence like a high-visibility jacket”, she never speaks above a whisper and refuses to leave her house for three years.

Miriam, a woman subjected to untenable brutality from her mentally ill mother, is embodied fear and repression. Rachel Elliott’s debut novel was a riotous treat, full of hapless, helpless characters and comically tragic circumstances.

Whispers Through a Megaphone by Rachel Elliott