STATE CHAMP, by Hilary Plum
Though the decision to seek an abortion is an inherently private one, walking into an abortion clinic in the United States can be an uncannily public act. A patient may have to dodge protesters trying to block her path to the building, or hide her face as they brandish photos of fetal remains. This disconnect between the politicization of female bodies and the personal experience of inhabiting them is darkly fitting: Roe v. Wade derived the right to abortion from the right to privacy; after Roe was overturned, individual lives became a matter of communal interest.
It is a disconnect that haunts “State Champ,” the sixth book by the novelist, poet and nonfiction writer Hilary Plum. The novel follows Angela Peterson, a 28-year-old receptionist at an abortion clinic in an unnamed Midwestern state where a “heartbeat law” has recently banned most abortions after six weeks. After Angela’s boss, Dr. M, is sentenced to at least 12 years in prison for violating this law, a jobless Angela takes up residence in the defunct clinic and stops eating. Reporters show up to interview and photograph her. The novel takes the form of her hunger strike journal, which she jots on exam table paper.
In the public imagination, Angela passes for a noble dissenter. In private, the snarky former state-champion runner with a history of D.U.I.s, a hearty sexual appetite and disordered eating is less saintly. Protest doesn’t come naturally to her: She is “not much of a sign waver.” She struggles to articulate the “goals” of her self-sacrifice. Does she expect it to free Dr. M? Is starving herself a spiritual act? Or is she just a garden-variety “anorexic slut,” as she puts it?
“State Champ” admirably resists the interpretive clarity the world craves from Angela. This feels true to the lived experience of protest: It can be alienating to translate the yearning to possess your own body, whether by aborting a fetus or starving yourself, into a public message. “The law is over here, it’s up here, it’s on the surface,” Angela tells one journalist. “When someone gets pregnant, it has to do with her up-here life, but it’s really a conversation the body is having with other bodies, including itself. … The law can’t get at what this is about.” So, during her 39-day strike, Angela communes not with the outside world but with an inner one.
Her own inner conversation, driven by self-deprivation, engages with a long lineage of isolated, unraveling female narrators, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s in “The Yellow Wallpaper” to Clarice Lispector’s in “The Passion According to G.H.” Plum’s contributions to this canon are often funny, and pleasantly odd: “Janine’s boobs were her whole point of view,” Angela thinks about her nemesis, an anti-abortion activist with a penchant for handing out baby dolls to the clinic’s patients; 14 days into her fast, Angela muses, “My hunger strike is ovulating.” But Angela’s mental state never quite approaches the madness of her predecessors’ (Gilman’s protagonist is subsumed into the walls that confine her; Lispector’s devours the insides of a dead cockroach and abandons language altogether). And as Angela grows increasingly delirious with hunger, Plum fragments her prose into a kind of self-conscious poetry that strains beneath the weight of the plot.
But the pleasure of this book lies not in its plot or even in its characters (Angela is more voice than character), but in the intimacy of its setting: the clinic that increasingly becomes the estranged Angela’s entire world. When the six-week ban came down, “the phones were ringing and the clock was ticking,” Plum writes, “like some supreme clock somewhere or every little clock everywhere, I was getting a feeling like everyone’s personal biological clock was in me, like that kids’ movie where a crocodile swallowed an alarm clock and he’s coming for you.”
As Angela points out, the judicial system may not be able to comprehend the ungovernable parts of our bodies and minds, to hear those ticking clocks inside us — but a novel can.
STATE CHAMP | By Hilary Plum | Bloomsbury | 216 pp. | $26.99
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