Review

Uncanny Juxtaposition / Other(ed) Women: Reading Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses alongside Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos

In this Uncanny Juxtaposition:

Louise Kennedy, Trespasses (Riverhead, 2022)

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Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos (New Directions, 2021)

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In the past several decades, feminist writers have sought to renovate the other woman story—often featuring an impressionable young woman who has an affair with an older, married man, only to end up pregnant, jilted, or worse. Sometimes, they have emphasized what Susan Koppelman calls revelations about how women “have been conditioned to need, love, and find excuses for men who oppress [them].”1 But two recent novels do something quite different: by setting the other woman story in a partitioned country, they position their female protagonist not only as a romantic other but as a subject of a political environment premised on the othering of at least some of its citizens. 

Several reviewers have viewed Louise Kennedy’s 2022 Trespasses, set in Northern Ireland during the 1980s Troubles, and Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2021 Kairos (translated into English in 2023), set in East Germany before its 1990 reunification, as fundamentally allegorical: in both, these readers suggest, an ultimately doomed romantic relationship crystallizes as it echoes larger political tensions. Both novels, they claim, also assert an analogy between the development of the unequal romantic relationship depicted and the environment in which it occurs, which is informed by tension, violence, and inequality. But juxtaposing these novels reveals more complex and also messier concerns, ones often implicit in a subgenre traditionally pitting (male) manipulation against (female) helplessness: is it possible for other (or othered) women to make good choices? In plots overdetermined by both gendered and political dynamics, can these women make choices at all? Or do these novels depict the failure of agency itself, and with it, of the ethics implicit in allegory? 

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Kennedy and Erpenbeck have no obvious connection, and the possible of influence in either direction seems precluded by the proximity of their novels’ publication dates. Yet the novels are uncannily similar. Both feature a married male lover (Michael in Trespasses and Hans in Kairos) who has had several previous affairs and is the father of a teenage son; he is also acquainted with his latest lover’s parent or parents, with whom he is a near contemporary. In both, the female protagonist is in her early twenties, just a bit older than her lover’s son; she has had limited and unsatisfying relationships with men her own age; and her father is dead or mostly absent. She seems mostly unbothered by her lover’s wife’s existence, though she occasionally suffers some of the classic reactions of literary other women, including jealousy, guilt, and empathy. Early in both novels, the male protagonist explicitly defines the parameters of the relationship; in both, he has access to a flat where assignations occur; and in both, the couple take a trip together to a location outside the conflict zone. And both novels begin and end at a later time when the political schism has healed and the relationship’s importance has receded. 

Trespasses’s focus on the challenges of doing the right thing is facilitated by its past-tense, third-person narration from the perspective of Cushla, a teacher at the local Catholic elementary school who also helps out at her family’s pub. The environment is tense: her young students are aware of daily local bombings and other attacks, and Cushla is repeatedly the object of sexualized comments and unwanted touching by Protestants. It is at the pub that Cushla first meets Michael, who, though Protestant, works as a barrister defending Catholic youth accused of violent acts, a profession that puts him at personal risk and whose effectiveness is arguably limited; out of political solidarity, most of his IRA-affiliated clients refuse to recognize the court. Michael is clearly engaged in selfless work, though Cushla’s friends question his virtue and especially his fascination with the Irish language, which he uses as a pretext for meetings with Cushla, as an act of latter-day colonialism, or, as one friend puts it, a way of “[e]xoticizing the natives.”  

Cushla’s attraction to Michael isn’t fully explained, though she at times associates it with the challenges of caring for her alcoholic mother and with her father’s recent death. Certainly, it seems visceral and helpless. She is aroused by him, partly, it seems, because he is in control; he sets the terms of their meetings as well as their sex, which he almost always initiates and which Cushla increasingly calls “fucking.” Even as she considers moving into his spare flat late in the novel, she acknowledges their affair as “doomed and grand”: it is almost certain, Cushla recognizes, to end unhappily.  

Trespasses’s several subplots—reprieves, as one reviewer notes, from the claustrophobic central relationship—emphasize Cushla’s attempts to do the right thing, especially with Davy, one of her students. She repeatedly tries to help him and his family while keeping him away from the school’s headmaster, who is fond of using a leather strap on disobedient students, and its cruel, possibly pedophiliac priest. Though she sometimes doesn’t notice how her actions are perceived by others and fails to perceive the romantic interest Davy’s older brother Tommy takes in her, Cushla’s impulses, like those evident in Michael’s work, are good.

For the most part, violence-torn and colonized Northern Ireland offers a setting for Cushla and Michael’s romantic relationship, but Kennedy also directly links the novel’s political and romantic plots. Tommy eventually murders Michael, and it turns out that the police, concerned about the controversial nature of Michael’s work, have been surveilling him and thus know about the affair. Cushla is brought in for questioning; one officer, noting that she is the only link between the two men, suggests that murder was motivated by jealousy rather than politics, leaving Cushla indirectly responsible for her lover’s death. While this somewhat melodramatic explanation is ultimately disproved, the moment highlights Kennedy’s interest in—and ultimate rejection of—a direct connection between the novel’s two main subplots. Instead, readers are left with the less tidy sense that Cushla’s position as an other woman, along with Michael’s death, are an effect of a more general situation in which selfhood is undermined, secrets are unmade by surveillance, and violence is inescapable.

Whereas violence in Trespasses is associated with suffering and physical pain, Kairos challenges this connection, along with Trespasses’s affirmations of agency, choice, and ethics. The novel’s present-tense mode of narration also complicates its perspective: it shifts between the perspective of the older writer and broadcaster Hans and that of his young lover Katharina, who holds various jobs in the arts. Similar complications are also evident in Erpenbeck’s torquing of several aspects of the archetypal other woman situation. Trespasses emphasizes Cushla’s willful refusal to imagine Michael’s wife as a person, partly because he seldom refers to her. But in Kairos, Hans insists that his relationship with Katharina is nourished by his marriage, an idea that seems reasonable to Katharina, perhaps because Hans often talks about his wife. The relationship between Hans and Katharina also lasts longer, and at one point, Katharina has sex with Vadim, a man her own age; toward the novel’s end, she enters a longer-term relationship with a woman, Rosa. 

Hans’s taste for violence and domination is initially evident in his and Katharina’s consensual sex: Katharina lets herself be tied down by Hans, and while she’s at first mystified when he leaves her there and has a cup of a coffee in another room, she accepts his explanation that anticipation is especially erotic. She repeatedly lets Hans beat her with his belt, dresses in ways inspired by the pornography he shows her, and buys a riding crop for him to use on her. But this unequal power dynamic becomes more complicated once Hans learns Katherina has slept with Vadim. (He condones her relationship with Rosa because he finds it arousing.) Though Hans early on acknowledges his fear that Katharina will leave him for someone younger, he systematically, even obsessively, belittles and humiliates her for her infidelity even though he has been cheating on his wife for years. He discounts Katherina’s threats of suicide as bourgeois and attention-seeking, lies to her in hopes she will confess to more transgressions, composes a vicious letter to Vadim and compels her to transcribe it, insists that she show him her diaries, and threatens suicide himself. Their sex also becomes more coercive; though she seems willing to be beaten by him, at one point he doesn’t stop hitting her until he realizes “she’s been crying for a long time”; at another, she wonders why anyone would want to beat someone they love. During this period, Katharina is mostly depicted as abject, both other and othered: “Hans has plucked out of her mouth the words that made her human.” 

Even as Hans’s manipulation of and brutality toward Katharina increase, Kairos challenges the simple notion that he is a perpetrator and she a victim. Katherina at one point refers to “the wreckage of [Hans’s] childhood”: a member of the Hitler Youth, he was belittled and beaten by his father and witnessed his mother’s public humiliation after she took a lover. The access we get to his thoughts throughout the novel also reveals him to be intelligent, sensitive to art, and thoughtful in his engagement with the hypocrisy and complexity of the German past. In fact, some of his ideas echo Erpenbeck’s elsewhere. A revelation in the novel’s epilogue offers another, more dramatic explanation for Hans’s behavior: he has, it turns out, been employed by the Stasi, though he relatively quickly becomes an object of their surveillance. His case is closed, Katharina notes, in the midst of his extended chastisement of her.

Hans’s past, as well as his experience with the Stasi and his recurrent meditations on the inextricability of the German past, present, and future, also help explain his obsession with commemorating various anniversaries, both positive and negative.  He compulsively saves receipts from meals he has had with Katherina, as well as scraps of paper and photos, which he calls “evidence.” His prolonged castigations of Katharina mostly occur via hourlong tapes he records in private, which she listens to, takes notes on, and then responds to in writing, though she realizes these responses give Hans “fresh weapons” against her. But Katharina also engages in similar acts: Hans learns of her encounter with Vadim by discovering a page on which she’s described it, and later, as an act of penitence, she gives Hans a diary she has kept especially for him. 

This concern with surveillance and documentation is partly an effect of the repressive and paranoid environment in the waning months of East Germany’s existence; to a lesser extent, similar themes are evident in Trespasses. But, unlike TrespassesKairos doesn’t depict this situation as wholly negative. Rather, it is essential not only to the relationship between Hans and Katharina but to the text of Kairos. The novel is structured as a transcription of—or at least derives from—documents Katharina later unearths in Hans’s official files; its chapters are titled with box and folder numbers. The supposedly negative byproducts of repression therefore aren’t, as in Trespasses, only a symptom of the paranoid world in which these characters live. They are also generative of that world, as well as of Kairos itself.  

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What, then, can be gained from the juxtaposition of these two quite different novels? Certainly Kairos is the more complex and ambitious text, partly because it interrogates humanistic (and perhaps moralistic) suppositions that Erpenbeck explicitly aligns with capitalist and indeed West German-sanctioned values. Trespasses invites its readers to understand the inequalities in Cushla and Michael’s relationship and Cushla’s inability to resist Michael’s advances as symptomatic of ways the Troubles infuse even love with violence. In Kairos, in contrast, Hans and Katharina’s affair isn’t hindered by but requires and is sustained by Germany’s partition, as well as the domination, subservience, and spying essential to it, which is probably why the relationship fizzles out as reunification approaches. While Trespasses is concerned, as its title indicates, with trespasses against or violations of established values, Kairos interrogates the very presuppositions of morality. For Hans and Katharina, good choices are impossible because what’s good can’t be determined amid the multiple acts of othering its characters have endured. But Erpenbeck also implies that it’s okay to be cut off and adrift. Or that’s the conundrum for readers trying to find a moral guide through, or an allegorical way to read, a work that refuses to tell us how to evaluate a relationship that, more radically than in Trespasses, undermines the principles of the other woman plot by depicting a relationship that is unequal but consensual, perhaps because both its participants are other and othered. 

I have been thinking about and writing this essay during the leadup to and aftermath of a United States election in which rhetoric about the other has predominated alongside radically different ways of imagining female bodily and intellectual autonomy, all amid an interrogation of so-called universal democratic ideals of tolerance, equality, self-determination, and ethics. As the effects of Donald Trump’s reelection unfold, they offer, among other things, a test case for issues essential to these novels. The relation between personal lives and an increasingly uncertain socio-political world has arguably become increasingly explicit in contemporary fiction. Whether novels written in the next four years and beyond, in the U.S. and elsewhere, will continue to reconfigure the other woman plot remains to be seen. Nor is it clear whether private romantic and sexual lives will continue to function as literary microcosms of or allegories for political (self-)dividedness or whether, as in Kairos, the very notions of analogy and allegory will continue to dismantled. Or perhaps allegory has persisted over millennia because it is always premised on unstable analogies, the kind that novels keep employing because they are provisional and therefore liable to collapse. 

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Thanks to Kathleen Boardman, Theresa Danna, Martha Hildreth, Deniz Kaptan, Gaye Nickles, and Wendy Swallow for conversations in which some of these ideas were generated.

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Endnotes

  1. Susan Koppelman, “Introduction,” in The Other Woman: Stories of Two Women and a Man, edited by Susan Koppelman (New York: Feminist Press, 1984), xviii.