Review by Colleen Rothman
SFWP / September 2022 / 184 pp
For a debut novel, Courtney Denelle’s It’s Not Nothing embraces a remarkable degree of risk. Voice and a highly internal focus drive the fragmented narrative. Denelle’s prose favors compression, and she renders many scenes with a few lines of dialogue or a single precise detail. Storytelling figures prominently as a theme, shaping the novel’s loose arc as a Künstlerroman. Additionally, housing insecurity, not the more standard artistic insecurity, marks the narrator’s exceptional journey.
The novel’s 22 chapters span roughly two years and gather into sections by season, beginning and ending with Summer. This chronology provides a necessary structure for the novel. The opening vignette, brief and dreamlike, introduces the narrator’s voice with little else in the way of characterization, scene, or setting. Details sharpen as the story unfolds.
The narrator, Rosemary, has left a hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, following a suicide attempt. It becomes clear she’s broke, struggling with alcohol dependency, lacking permanent housing, bouncing between strangers’ beds after last call. “Who has been paying my way? I have. I pay with all of me,” Rosemary says.
Rosemary’s body, which she describes as “a bag of wire hangers” with “a face paled to skim-milk blue,” lays bare her trauma. When Rosemary runs into an old friend, Suz, she “reads the wounds lining my inner arms” and offers her a couch to crash on. With this sliver of stability, Rosemary finds a job at a bar. Then Suz tells Rosemary she’s moving away, and that brief stability erodes. She takes the bus to the coast and tries to drown herself at the beach, warranting another trip to a hospital. This section marks the first mention of Rosemary’s family, with suggestions of childhood trauma.
Denelle populates Rosemary’s days with bus rides, public library bathrooms, recovery meetings, consignment stores, and coat drives. Instead of menstrual pads, she uses “paper towels, lifted by the ream from the Convention Center bathroom.” Holes in her sneakers could be patched with “a few squares of cardboard.” Yet Denelle resists a plucky narrative of resilience. Rosemary refuses to reduce herself to a metaphor—the tenacious ivy her father ripped off the garage every year. “I am a human animal,” she says, “brutally aware.”
The stakes rise when the weather gets cold, an existential threat for “living in a body on the street.” After a handful of winter adventures, including hypocritical encounters with charitable church ladies and a motel owner, Rosemary visits a mental health clinic, finally seeking help. She explains that “it wasn’t rock bottom like you see on TV—there was no comeuppance or absolution. The story of my relationship with the bottle isn’t that kind of story.” Having found “the right meds” for her mental illness, she secures a room at a shelter. Still, she says, “I am never far from my nook” — the outdoor spot below a stairwell where she spent some nights when she had nowhere else to go.
Rosemary eventually leaves the shelter for “a two-room studio less than a mile from where I was born,” in the “forlorn mill town” of Pawtucket. Denelle carefully separates survival from thriving. “My urge to hurt myself never left,” Rosemary says. When a guy flirts with her, she exposes an acute lack of human connection: “I couldn’t get off even if I wanted to. I have dead pussy and it feels like relief. One less thing, you know?”
In this setting, geographically closer to her trauma’s source, It’s Not Nothing turns further inward and grows more fragmented, relying less on scenes than thoughts strung together. “My safety relies on lessening, lightening to survive,” Rosemary says. But her attempts at “selective forgetting” become more difficult. As memories surface, collaged with present-action scenes of group counseling, individual therapy, and a uterine biopsy, the details of her father’s abuse emerge. In the titular line, she summarizes her situation: “The ability to take a beating. It’s not nothing.” When her two siblings belatedly enter the story, Rosemary emerges as family truth-teller: “I broke the rule when first I spoke. I took what happened in that house out of the house. Laid it all on the table, words no longer minced.” Telling her story is the ultimate transgression.
From the book’s opening lines — “Stories told and retold. They taste like blood in my mouth.” — Denelle has made it clear what she and her narrator are up to. “It’s all I’ve got left,” Rosemary says, “this describing the water as I drown.” But it’s not until the penultimate chapter when she decides, at the suggestion of her therapist, to write things down. The final vignette speeds through several stages in the artist’s development—sharing pages with a trusted reader, weathering rejection, experimenting with genre—at a pace that feels somewhat rushed, arriving quickly at its ultimate implication that It’s Not Nothing is the product of this effort, a work of autofiction, with Rosemary standing in for the author.
Place lends tension to a story that keeps most characters at a distance. A self-described “true townie” from a “blue-collar household,” Rosemary lives on the fringes of the “postcard” most people associate with Rhode Island. Through her perspective, we see the Brown University students in Providence: “I’m blinded by salmon-colored chinos, navy blue blazers with gold emblems; unfettered expectations, a whole world of possibilities unfolding at their feet on command,” summer tourists in Newport: “At every turn, khaki shorts and flip-flops astride rented bikes,” hipsters “abandoning Providence, moving to Pawtucket, trying to get a scene going.”
Even those without knowledge of the student/tourist version of New England may appreciate this perspective from the grittier world that exists in its shadows. It’s Not Nothing recounts an artist’s emergence from such circumstances without romanticizing the journey, and the darkly comic voice driving the story makes it a fascinating ride.
Colleen Rothman's essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Literary Hub, Kenyon Review Online, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in New Orleans, where she is working on a collection of short stories set in south Louisiana.