Melanie Joosten turns telescope on relationships in Gravity Well

Melanie Joosten’s second novel Gravity Well examines the simultaneous push-pull influence of ­intimate relationships.

Detail from the cover of Gravity Well, by Melanie Joosten.

In Gravity Well, Melanie Joosten has traded the claustrophobic setting of her 2011 debut Berlin Syndrome for a kaleidoscopic structure, examining the simultaneous push-pull influence of ­intimate relationships on the individuals who inhabit them.

Though our families and partners can provide us with our sense of belonging, they can also stifle our attempts to develop as indivi­duals, and this tension provides the backdrop for Joosten’s second novel.

Gravity Well opens with Lotte, an astronomer living in South America where she has been working on a research project identifying planets in other solar systems for their ­potential to host life. Lotte’s mother inspired her interest in astronomy, though her death from breast cancer is one of the reasons Lotte fled Australia, leaving behind her grieving ­father and her husband.

Lotte prides herself on her self-sufficiency and is defiant in pursuing her ambitions, whe­ther or not the people in her life can be accommodated by her decisions. Before she left Australia she was tested for the offending breast cancer gene, but is ambivalent about whether to inform herself of the results.

In another narrative strand, Eve is on a bus on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, headed somewhere between Lorne and Apollo Bay. Whereas Lotte avoids the difficult aspects of her life by diverting her attention to her work, Eve’s grief is in danger of consuming her.

As the story unfolds, we learn that Eve is punishing herself for her role in some unspoken tragedy. Joosten offers hints to what this is. We know, for example, Eve was married and had a young daughter, Mina. That aspect of her life is tenderly evoked in Eve’s memories of caring for Mina. She remembers “letting her slide into the tights before setting her down again”.

Eve’s husband is older but his reassuring love offers the support she needs. In the novel’s present, Eve is separated from her husband and daughter and the book’s central mystery is why.

Lotte and Eve, friends since university, share a candour neither has found in her romantic relationships, but intervening events have caused estrangement between them. Lotte and Eve represent the two poles of human need: Lotte the impulse to shed ties to live on her own terms, Eve the willingness to make sacrifices to secure her place in the lives of others.

Gravity Well is masterfully constructed: about half way through Joosten delivers a set-piece revelation as Eve and Lotte’s stories collide. Thanks to Joosten’s three-dimensional narrative puzzle, unfolding the story along three different timelines, the true nature of a key relationship is concealed until this explosive revelation. As with her first novel, Joosten is more concerned with emotionally complex relationships than conventional ones.

Despite its relative brevity, Gravity Well navigates an impressive emotional landscape. Joosten is as convincing inhabiting the perspective of Lotte nursing her dying mother, ­“determined to be the daughter she no longer had the lifetime to be”, as Eve’s deprived childhood in which, if her father “tapped her lightly on the bum with his foot”, she “liked to think it was ­affection”. Without labouring their ­respective histories, Joosten sketches convincing psychologies for her characters.

Joosten is plainly gifted in her ability to use language to capture everyday occurrences. When Eve hears her husband laugh, the sound “hovers above her like a cloud”; a young boy is described entering a pool, “jogging his feet to carry him into the air”.

But her writing can be cluttered. In Berlin Syndrome, Joosten’s granular descriptions worked ­because most of the novel was set inside an apartment and her protagonist’s observations about her surroundings helped ­illuminate her life lived in captivity.

Her less convincing images in this novel are those that don’t reflect on characters or themes, sitting statically in a narrative that is otherwise ­dynamic. Ferries on Sydney Harbour described as “stout ­matrons, caught with lengths of toilet paper ­attached to their sensible heels”, for ­example, is a complicated image difficult to grasp visually.

There are two options for a realist writer ­depicting trauma: confront it directly, or write around it, imply it and capture its effects. Joosten opts for the former, meticulously outlining the shape of her characters’ emotions and slowly filling in the detail.

In the moment of unimaginable tragedy that comes with the novel’s denouement, Joosten writes of her characters: “All of their faces had forgotten how to do things.” This is how she is able to capture a ­diversity of human experience, by breaking it down into component parts until we feel as intimate with these characters as she is.

People, Lotte muses, are like planets, pulling others into their orbit. “Drift too close to ­another and you risk falling down a planet’s gravity well … stay too far away and you risk being cut loose.”

Grafting an astronomy metaphor on to a novel might easily have come across as forced, but Joosten doesn’t overwork its relevance. She allows it to hover over her narrative and resonate on the meaning of events as they unfold.

Though there is loss at the centre of Gravity Well, Joosten knows that the most urgent ­obser­vations about life come from making sense of the unfathomable. This is a carefully crafted, emotionally cathartic novel. Our journey away from suffering, Joosten suggests, ­begins with our movement towards each other.

Gretchen Shirm is a critic and author.

Melanie Joosten will be a guest of the Sydney Writers Festival, which starts on Monday.

Gravity Well

By Melanie Joosten

Scribe, 288pp, $29.99