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A Novel
by Michelle Hart
Book Reviewed by:Michelle Hart's debut novel We Do What We Do in the Dark follows Mallory, a college student who has an affair with a female professor and writer of children's books referred to only as "the woman."
Mallory, while grieving her recently deceased mother, first notices the woman at the campus gym. She later encounters her in the restroom at an author event, where the two hit it off and begin a series of careful moves towards one another, eventually resulting in an intense connection that is not quite a romance. The woman has a husband, though he is away at the time, and she and Mallory meet secretly, never fully discussing what is happening between them. In sparse, winding prose, Hart leads the reader into this scenario — a captivating series of question marks, half-formed ideas and wandering implications.
Just as Mallory is continually stymied in her attempts to understand the woman, the reader is beckoned into Hart's story without any easy indication of how to feel about the situation before them. Yes, the woman is much older than Mallory, but Mallory is, at least theoretically, an adult. Yes, the woman is a professor at Mallory's college, but she is not her professor. Yes, the woman is married, but Mallory is enlightened on the details concerning the woman's relationship with her spouse, as slowly as any other details about her.
It is only after the affair ends, without fanfare, that we are given substantial context for it in the form of flashbacks into Mallory's past — her relationships with her best friend in high school and with her father, the lead-up to her mother's death and its aftermath. In this section, the narrative loses some momentum, particularly after the metered suspense of the affair, but it provides essential insight into the main character's inner core. Hart then shows how the continuing arc of Mallory's adult life is affected by her involvement with the woman, and how she reacts to spending time with her years later on a trip to the ominously appropriate setting of Salem, Massachusetts (see Beyond the Book). The story is somewhat heavy-handed with its persistent symbolism surrounding the concepts of light and dark as representations of openness and secrecy, but fascinating in its dissection of isolation, along with the sense of specialness and exclusivity that those who practice solitude may be chasing, and which appears to be the driving force behind Mallory and the woman's relationship.
While it is clear that the woman has had a disproportionate amount of influence over Mallory's life due to the nature and timing of their affair, and that Mallory has suffered because of it, the novel does not allow the reader to simply settle on the idea that the woman manipulated or took advantage of her. Instead, it shows how the woman didn't have to knowingly do either of these things in order to place Mallory in a compromised position.
The patterns of Mallory's life, including those leading her to the woman, are defined by isolation and secrecy. And these patterns, Hart's novel suggests, are not hers alone but ones designed by her personal experiences as well as the world she lives in. Her mother's death isolates her because the suffocating feelings surrounding it make her crave escape from others. Her attraction to women isolates her because she doesn't know how to name it. The sense of aimlessness she feels as a first-year college student isolates her because, while no doubt a common phenomenon, it is still not an easily decipherable experience. She goes to the woman looking for answers because the things she wants to know — about death, about queerness, about building a life and an identity and a future — are not accessible in broad daylight.
We Do What We Do in the Dark is an intriguing study of solitude and the reasons for its formation and endurance.
This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2022, and has been updated for the
June 2023 edition.
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