![]() ![]() Has a novel ever squeezed on to its pages the titles of so many other books? Reading is essential to our heroine – sensual, too. While Checkout 19 may frustrate the reader’s desire for basic details about its protagonist’s background (like Bennett, she grows up in south-west England then moves to Ireland, while we learn of a sibling only near the very end), it luxuriates in long passages of lit crit. ![]() It’s a way of parsing herself as well as others ![]() Reading is essential to our heroine – sensual, too. Along the way, stellar comic riffs on the horrors of a shared packet of crisps illustrate how popularity in the playground (and in general) is nothing but a trap and fantasies about rocking up to the Lancôme counter with a scrap of period-stained loo roll and asking the sales assistant to colour-match a lipstick nod to gross-out feminism. Rambling, sparsely punctuated sentences often repeat themselves and its conversational style – “that’s right”, the narrator likes to reassure herself – contrasts with a satisfyingly recondite vocabulary, running to words such as ouroboros and autotelic. ![]()
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