In an essay on weightlifting, Kathy Acker describes the process of gradually building muscle as something that forces a confrontation with the limits of the body, “with chaos, with my own failure or a form of death”. What she describes would not be recognised by the unnamed protagonist of Anna Metcalfe’s Chrysalis, who takes up bodybuilding as a means of asserting control. The novel focuses on a period of transition as this young woman emerges from a difficult childhood and an abusive relationship. She quits her job, sculpts a beautiful and powerful body, eats clean, and develops her own meditation technique. Her skin takes on a hallowed but very literal glow. She starts to post videos and images of herself on social media and acquires a following. The videos, which are made for high-speed playback, show her statuesque body, surrounded by plants, often outdoors, holding itself exquisitely still for hours at a time.
Metcalfe has previously published short stories, and was recently named on Granta magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists list. Chrysalis, her first novel, is told across three narratives that describe her protagonist’s transformation from three distanced points of view. At the gym she meets Elliot, a lonely workaholic. She is increasingly estranged from her isolated mother, Bella. Susie, a former colleague, becomes her flatmate for a while. Elliot, Bella and Susie are all painfully vulnerable and chronically lonely. There is no framing device, no pretext for their telling us what they know about this woman, and the background is so lightly sketched that it feels neutralised. Elliot lives in an anonymous urban area, a poignant sunset skyline seen through the gym’s glass wall. Well into the story, this somewhat abruptly becomes Sheffield.
Elliot is a freelancer and his “big jobs” define him, but the passages describing his work habits make no direct reference to what he does. Susie’s hinterland is also only glimpsed, and through the book we uncover much about why the protagonist becomes an influencer, but little sense of how. In a novel concerned with curated displays of experience, this wonky, haphazard cleansing of context works. It heightens the forcefield around its subject, giving her that ultrafiltered, hyperreal plausibility that is influencer capital. I felt that I could see her large stilled form, the tree stirring behind her in her overgrown garden, and could understand why a person might follow her – the “cool and pleasant feeling” that she can induce. The absence of context also feeds the feeling that something is seriously amiss. “Cut yourself off,” she urges her followers. “Do you really need the people in your life, or do they need you?”
Elliot, Bella and Susie need her, in surprisingly similar ways. They sound alike too, their language limpid and eerie, a queasy wellness blend of psychoanalysis and internet niceness that has them speak of transitional objects, optimisation, flow, authenticity, containment. The book as a whole made me think about how much we want to talk about ourselves, and how basic our resources are. It doesn’t have a particular thesis on online selfhood, though – it’s all in the telling, which is gripping and subtle. Small pieces of information are drip fed to the reader, each moment viewed and reviewed across the different narratives. It feels fizzy, with all these pops of observation on the move.
Over time, we come to see several different points of origin for the woman’s drive to metamorphosis. She needs to look big, strong and still. She seems to think a lot about becoming a plant. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is a clear influence, and I also thought of the end of Richard Powers’ The Overstory – female characters, merging with plants, find respite in obliteration. Woman-becomes-plant is an old story, but there’s been a recent flowering. The essayist Elvia Wilk, writing on what she calls the “New Weird”, has described these fictions of “rooting oneself and becoming plant” as “a vicious claim to life” at this present point in history, in a world catastrophically obsessed with progress. A heavy and affecting sense of impending horror hangs over Chrysalis, but the conclusion pulls back from that and arrives at something more fragmentary, sadly ordinary in a way. Different things happen to different characters; there’s a messiness, as though the drama has come into contact with its limits. The book is bigger and stronger for it.
• Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
