Entertainment, Books - Army Times

‘Disquiet’ speaks volumes on family drama

To be sure, Julia Leigh’s sophomore work of fiction, “Disquiet,” is disquieting, a literary story of suspense and even horror.

But it’s also haunting in a less literal, more ethereal way. Leigh has packed so much nuance into 121 taut pages that you finish the slim volume and immediately want to read it again, to search for second and third meanings among the subtly shaded prose.

At the outset, Olivia, also known as simply “the woman,” has mysteriously journeyed from Australia to her mother’s drafty French chateau, as dark and unadorned as Leigh’s writing style (which, interestingly, is quite at odds with the style of Leigh’s mentor, Toni Morrison). Olivia turns up — with her two young children, a broken arm and a shadowy past — for the first time in more than a decade, and for an indefinite stay. (Of course, it’s almost a cliché in literature that within big, old houses dwell, and fester, big, old problems.)

But the household — Grandmother and her long-serving housekeeper, Ida, as well as Ida’s twin teenage assistants — is unsettled far more by the arrival of Olivia’s brother, Marcus, his wife, Sophie, and their baby daughter, Alice. Alice’s tiny stillborn body, that is, which her mother fiercely clings to, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

In reuniting a family, Leigh has painted a powerful, audacious, even shocking portrait of familial decay.