Who Gets To Tell Whose Story?
Mental illness, dysfunctional families, and authorship in Toby Lloyd's Fervour.
(Also published on my Substack, Blog Therapy.)
Fervour is many things—a story of family dysfunction á la Franzen, a meditation on what it means to be religious, an unanswerable rabbinic riddle, a ghost story—but what I want to focus on is its take on mental illness. Mental illness described from a distance, told in third person, mental illness as an unaddressed consequence of generational trauma, a shameful stain on the family name, the elephant in the room at dinner.
This led me to wonder about who gets to talk about another’s pain; who can have authorship over another’s experiences. In Fervour, the answer to that question mirrors dynamics usually found in dysfunctional and abusive families: important information always arrives second hand, mediated, from a source with authority, but not credibility, on its side.
Beware: detailed spoilers from here on.
Lloyd’s debut novel, released in March 2024, is about the slow, messy undoing of a North London Jewish family. We meet the Rosenthals—parents Eric and Hannah and their three children, Gideon, Elsie and Tovyah—as they face the imminent death of Eric’s father, Yosef, a Polish Holocaust survivour. The story takes place on two timelines: one, set in 1999, includes Yosef’s funeral and the aftermath, and another, set in 2008, follows the youngest son, Tovyah, in his first year at Oxford.
In the first timeline, the Rosenthals unravel after Yosef’s death. Hannah has dug herself out of a professional dry spell by writing a memoir of Yosef’s time in Treblinka and she plans to publish it now that he’s gone—against his explicit wish that the manuscript be burned. Understandably, it turns the rest of the family against her.
But it’s Elsie, who was very close with the old man, who’s hit the hardest. She begins acting erratically at school, turning in gory creative writing assignments based on the Hebrew Bible and scaring her classmates. She eventually goes missing and is found, four days later, wandering the Norfolk coast.
Back at home, though, something about her feels irretrievably changed. From a series of vignettes spread throughout the book, we learn the extent of Elsie’s mental illness. She begins drinking, starving and cutting herself, and showing signs of psychosis. She develops an obsession with occult and mystic texts like the Zohar and the Kabbalah. She oscillates between catatonia and manic states in which she appears to channel her grandfather, speaking in an unnaturally low voice and with a strange accent. Eventually, her religious fanatic mother is convinced Elsie has become either a witch or a victim of demonic possession.
Meanwhile, in the second timeline, Hannah’s memoir about Yosef—which reveals what her father-in-law was forced to do to survive the camps—has become a bestseller and her career took off from there. Apart from Elsie, whose mental health went from bad to worse in the intervening nine years, the other kids have moved out and rarely speak to their mother. Tovyah is now a jaded and confrontational young man struggling to fit in with his coursemates at Oxford, and Gideon, whose coming out fell on deaf ears, has moved to Israel and enrolled in the army.
The kids are not alright, and who can blame them? Hannah’s literary ambitions and religious zealotry have cannibalised her family life and their un-confrontational father seems to have retreated into his study, where he endlessly studies the Torah. What’s worse, they are both too preoccupied to notice their kids’ mental health is disintegrating. Better to stick to the family party line.
This second timeline, in 2008, is told from the perspective of Tovyah’s only friend at Oxford, a girl named Kate who is coming to terms with her own Jewish heritage and with her inexplicable attraction to the patronising, alienated, and alienating Tovyah.
We learn through the grapevine—Fervour’s favourite way of sharing important information—that Hannah is now working on a follow-up, this time about her own daughter. Sensationally titled Daughters of Endor, Hannah’s second book mines Elsie’s mental illness, along with personal diaries and patient records, to tell a story of “a girl waylaid by demonic influences”.
The style is pulpy, addictive, and the truth of what really happened to Elsie, impossible to place. Hannah believes her daughter found a way to commune with the dead through her study of forbidden texts, or even that she’s a witch. In one passage, which Lloyd excerpts in full, in italics, she suggests Elsie has managed to raise a golem—a humanoid creature made out of clay or mud using dark magic—and is hiding it in Yosef’s old attic room.
This bonkers theory isn’t mentioned again and no one, not even Elsie herself, tries to deny it. In fact, while Hannah writes, lucratively and at length, about her daughter’s mental illness, Elsie is quiet on the subject. We never learn her version of the events, only Hannah’s.
Mental illness as a story told in third person
Like every other difficult topic in this novel (Yosef’s experience in Treblinka, what happened to Elsie when she ran away from home, Tovyah’s growing disillusionment with the world, his family, and with religion), mental illness is a story that can only be told in the third person, by one character about another. We never know if we’re getting the truth or an altered version that reveals more about the one telling it. It’s always mediated by a personally-involved but unreliable narrator.
Similar to how, in dysfunctional families, members can’t speak for themselves, the characters in Fervour don’t talk directly about their own grief, their own alcoholism or their own psychosis—only about the others’ mental health problems. Hannah talks (and writers, at length) about Yosef’s grisly past and Elsie’s supposed possession; Kate muses about Tovyah’s alienation from his peers and calls the over-eating, over-drinking Gideon a “functional alcoholic”.
Take Elsie, for example, who despite being the ostensible main character, is remarkably absent from her own story. We hear versions of it from other characters, but never from Elsie herself. The closest she gets to talking about her own mental illness is near the book’s tragic final scene, when she asks Tovyah to consider whether their mother might actually be right. What if Elsie really is a witch, communing with the dead after having dug too deep into mysticism? What if she wants everyone “running around shit scared”?
“What if I don’t want to get better? Ever think of that? What if I’m not ill and I’m not possessed, this is just how I am. Maybe I like everyone running around shit scared. All the attention, the total lack of responsibilities.
“I do know what I’m doing. Even when I was a little girl, if I wanted a day off, all I had to do was play sick for my Mummy. Always worked.” (pp. 294)
Whether this is the truth or more news from nowhere, the ramblings of a self-destructive, mentally ill young woman, we never find out. And it doesn’t matter. The point is that the most concrete thing she ever says about herself is too little too late. I don’t want to spoil the whole ending, but if you’ve read Fervour, you know what I mean.
Something similar happens with Tovyah. We hear about his dismissiveness, his loneliness and alienation among his peers at Oxford, the unmaterialized hopes that uni life would be a clean start, and more—but not from him. For large portions of the novel, it’s his only friend at Oxford, Kate, who gets to talk about Tovyah. Sure, he sometimes goes on one of the tirades he’s known (and avoided) for on campus, but still we only experience them from Kate’s perspective.
The other characters also have plenty to say about Tovyah. Elsie is surprised to learn her baby brother, a boy who at home only wanted to please everyone, is known as such a grouch by his coursemates. Gideon, back from Israel for a few brief, but juicy, scenes near the novel’s denouement, also has a fossilized image of a harmless Tovyah who is all bark and no bite. As for his parents, they’re wilfully in the dark about his disappointment with them, his atheism, his career choices, responding to all noises of dissent with the equivalent of “please, don’t start.”
Gideon is perhaps the least explored of all the Rosenthal siblings and that’s too bad. We know he’s gay and has left London to join the IDF, to his parents’ dismay. The most we learn about him is towards the end of the book, when he’s just arrived home from Israel and immediately proceeds to dig out a hidden wine bottle from the depths of his closet, forcing Kate to join, presumably so he doesn’t have to drink alone. Later, she muses that Gideon is a “functional alcoholic that was fewer steps than he realised from becoming, like his sister, a dysfunctional one.” His eating habits are also over-the-top: at Shabbos dinner he devours plate after plate, washed down with even more wine, followed by a smoke and several nightcaps of whiskey, again shared with Kate.
In what must be the novel’s most sincere moment, he opens up about why he really moved to Israel: not for the army, but for a boy he fell in love with, and then for the nightlife in Tel Aviv, enjoyed with the abandon of a people who believe they could be bombed into oblivion at any moment.
He tells Kate:
“They don’t give a fuck about embarrassing themselves, or saying the wrong thing, or any of that English bullshit. They live their lives at a million miles an hour and they party like bastards. And I thought, this, this is what I want. I want this boy. These mountains. These nights. I want to party like a bastard. I want this life, and nothing but this life, until I die.” (pp.291)
But again, we experience this confession of Gideon’s inner turmoil through Kate’s eyes, who’s already drunk at that point in the evening.
And anyway, Gideon didn’t find what he went looking for in Tel Aviv. His relationship didn’t last. “What about the life?”, Kate asks. “Is it what you wanted?” Gideon laughs in response. “It’s not for everyone.”
That’s it. That’s the closest anyone in Fervour gets to admitting they are unhappy. Everything else is a game of mental health telephone so deftly executed that it makes the reader wonder: who gets to tell whose story in the end?
Who gets to tell whose story?
Fervour’s answer to that question is, like I said, similar to the dynamics at play in dysfunctional families. In a system like that, there is a person or unit—usually the parents—who speaks for everyone else and, in doing so, gains authorship over their experiences. This role usually goes to the person with the most control over the others, which in the first timeline is Hannah.
Despite the twisted logic, that makes sense. Hannah is ambitious to a fault about everything—religion, career, parenting—and it shows in her need to control every narrative. She distills Yosef’s concentration camp experience into a bestseller and her daughter’s mental illness into a mystic event and then a professional opportunity. She refuses to acknowledge Gideon’s coming out and Tovyah’s distress, likely because they don’t fit the story. Finally, she sets to work on a third memoir, titled The Mother and told from her own perspective. I love the humour in this book.
But, in the second timeline why does Kate get authorship over Tovyah and, to a lesser extent, Gideon? I’m not totally sure. Maybe to mirror the othering nature of mental illness and dysfunctional families by having them witnessed by an outsider— who’s not a Rosenthal and not fully Jewish, meaning on her mother’s side, which is the side that counts.
In the way it decides who gets to tell whose story, Fervour reflects the family at its core. Just like dysfunctional families tend to brush off the effects of generational trauma and neglect (what will the neighbours think?), they also tend to speak for each other without consent. That’s how family roles become crystallised, and that’s how dissent, truth-telling and individuality get silenced. Members become experts, mouthpieces, on each other, but no one gets to tell their own story—lest they slip up and start talking about what’s really going on.