Review: That Was Not My Intention, by Frances Pavletich
That Was Not My Intention, the edgy debut novel by bookseller, editor and teacher Frances Pavletich, has perhaps one of the strongest opening lines in recent memory – ‘Lola and Elija were in the bathtub, an empty bottle of wine floating between them, debating what killed love faster: honesty or neglect.’
It’s a revealing introduction to this pair of best friends – young, sexed-up, straddling the thin edge between confidence and insecurity, but also ready to rip shit and bust at the slightest perceived provocation. And in a sort of contemporary foil to Jane Austen’s seminal Pride & Prejudice, it immediately offers the reader a critical lens through which to weigh the merits of either flaw.
Ostensibly, the main narrative centres around the relationship between Lola and her privileged boyfriend, Ben. Over the years, Lola and Ben’s relationship is marred by their shared self-destructive tendencies, most heavily enabled by alcohol and/or drugs. They collide, orbit each other and reemerge in each other’s lives at inopportune times. The non-apology-apology implied in the title says it all.
But this is really a story about the bond between Lola and Elija, the most interesting relationship explored in the book. It’s trite to claim That Was Not My Intention is a ‘friendship novel’, but it is a novel about how life changes can shift the balance of power between two people. Lola’s relationship with Elija is the longest and strongest in her life – at times, they bring out both the best and the worst in each other.
Each of Pavletich’s ensemble cast of first-name-only characters (Peter, Polly, Jay, Robert, and GG, to name a few more) wield the double-edged sword of both honesty and neglect in their interactions with each other. For the majority of the novel, these exquisitely tortured youths are simply excruciatingly awful.
Ben thinks to himself at one point that, ‘storytelling was just as important as spectacles of violence’, and that quality is very much on display – this is not a book for people who need at least one sympathetic character to root for. It’s no secret that this general ‘unlikability’ for her characters is by design; Pavletich was open in a recent interview for The Spinoff Review of Books that ‘[readers] focus too much on morality when we judge characters.’
Pavletich’s writing has a slippery nature, and an equally intriguing placeless-ness. From one paragraph to the next, perspectives slide between characters fluidly and without warning, dipping into and out of their impressions of each other, opinions and unreliable narratives melding into one cerebral milieu. Art, taste and performative intellect – references to cult movies, niche books and obscure live art performances – are spent like social currency.
No specific setting – no city name, no street name, no notable building – is ever mentioned. Is this happening in Dunedin? Prague? Wellington (my preferred reading)? In some sense, it doesn’t really matter, as Lola, Elija, Ben and the others are so relentlessly consumed with their standing in relation to other people, of perceived slights and faults, that any physical location is irrelevant. They’d be crashing and burning no matter where they were.
‘All humans had notoriously selective memories, which made their mistakes painful but typical and their alibis sophisticated but narrow. Stories were, by their nature, slippery. Sometimes people were the bad guys in our lives, and other times, we were the bad guys in theirs,’ Ben’s older half-brother, Peter observes at a party. Truth is certainly relative, and everyone has their own.
In That Was Not My Intention, Pavletich plays at the intersection of love, power, control and the concept of the self. It’s messy, and someone is going to get hurt – regardless of anyone’s best or worst intentions.
