“ Notes on the survival of fire '' attacks the culture of rape on university campuses

About Midway through the first novel by Christine Murphy, “Notes on surviving the Fire”, his protagonist, Sarah Common, tells a guy that she is released that rape films do not work. “Action films are man films,” she says. “Rape is not something that men understand.” When the guy asks her to explain more, she gives a little speech that deserves to be as often quoted as the monologue of “Girl Cool” by “Gone Girl”:

“I think men think rape is an unwanted sex. And sex is great. So how bad can sex be? ” She develops: “You think it's like being nourished by a cookie. You don't want cookie, maybe it's not your favorite type or you are not in a mood, but it's just a cookie. And you eat cookies all the time. So – What is the problem? The world, big, is just a cookie.

“Notes on fire survival” – February 25 – concerns rape: real and specific acts of sexual violence, the reality of rape On university campuses, and even rape as a metaphor for the way people with money and energy can fuck people without it, without consequences. But it is also the violence more broadly, that we expect to see the handy and how we react when we discover that those we love the most are capable.

The book opens with Sarah and her best friend, Nathan, smoking grass in her truck. They are both in the last period of their doctoral program in religious studies at the University of California Santa Teresa, both to the heart of the demand of teachers, both preferring to spend time and smoking, sniff or swallow the drugs they have on hand in order to repel their dark perspectives. Bleak because the Californian coast is on fire (Sarah often comments ash in their mouths, students pulling their t-shirts on their mouths), due to the academic labor market always insufficient, due to the accumulated debt of their studies and the pathetic allowances they earn for teaching, due to the impossible cost of life, because their students do not seem to worry about anything.

It is, in fact, a disastrous time for many in higher education and has done so for some time. Murphy perfectly portrays these difficulties, how Sarah encourages participation in her class by launching mini-candy barrels to students. Those like me, a graduate of a doctoral program – “the derived and under -qualified”, as Sarah says – will surely be gravitated towards this aspect of the book.

And then, of course, there is the reality of rape on university campuses. Sarah, who was raped by a student colleague graduated three years before the start of the novel, passed Fridays at 4 p.m. in group therapy with other sexual assault survivors. Not that this seems particularly useful – women are all exhausted by the procedures of the title IX, and the therapists who direct the group are frustrating and neutral. It was Nathan, the only one in the department who believed that Sarah (others thought that the rapist, as she refers to him, was simply too big for having done something like that), who has really been his rock over the years since the assault.

She is devastated when, at the beginning of the novel, she finds Nathan who died of a heroin overdose. Knowing him for years, she is convinced that there is a foul -smelling game because he had never used heroin – although her sister attends semi -angle rehabilitation for his own drug addiction – and, moreover, he is left -handed, but the injection site was in his left arm. There are a lot of plausible explanations but Sarah does not believe them. She begins to wonder if there is a link between Nathan's death and the others – mainly undergraduate students – on campus.

“Notes” follows Sarah as she tries to investigate death, but really, it's a trip to sorrow, and the novel is not interested in a tidy detective story. It is a much more disorderly book than that, but in large part, I believe, by design. Sarah tells Nathan that she is so angry that she “does not remember what does not feel in angle”, and that is obvious on each page. Sarah has many reasons to be angry: her rapist gets job interviews, her only friend is dead and her advisor ignores her repeated requests for her thesis – and it's not even half. His trajectory through the novel is not as much the journey of a hero as it is an attempt to resume a certain control over his fate.

While the culmination and the end of the novel feel a little stupid in relation to what preceded – which, although sometimes funny, is deeply felt and quite serious – Murphy has certainly written a furious, fast, emotionally resonant and memorable novel. I will still think of this for a while.

Masad, a critic of books and culture, is the author of the novel “All My Mother's Lovers” and the next novel “Beings”.