Spoilers!
One of my favorite philosophical jokes you may have heard before goes: Is it solipsistic in here or is it just me? What is out there there but what’s in here here? Thoughts are the only reality. Iain Reid’s brain-melting 2016 debut book, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, asks these questions in a deeply unsettling way. Brisk, but thoughtful (heh), and a book that made me want to read it again just to catch what I missed the first time. This is unlike anything else I’ve read this year. I can’t quite get my mental hands around the shape of the thing. In fact, I’m not sure how I’m even going to properly review it, but let’s see how it goes.
An unnamed woman is on a road trip with her new boyfriend of only six weeks, Jake, to visit his parents at their farmhouse in the country. She opens her narration of the book by saying she’s thinking of ending things with Jake, which makes doing a road trip with him to see his parents an odd choice. Now, going into books as I do without reading the synopsis, I assumed the title was alluding to a suicide, not a relationship break-up. More on that in a moment.
As Jake and his girlfriend, the narrator, are driving to the house, they have a lot of abstract, philosophical conversations. Like, how nonsensical it is for someone to claim to be the best kisser, because again, is it solipsistic in here or what, you can’t kiss alone! Or how a day on Venus is the equivalent of 243 Earth days, so what is a day, a year, a second really? Combined with the unnamed narrator’s inner monologue and observations about Jake — as well as her reflecting on how they met — the first half of the book read like stream of consciousness, despite it ostensibly being communication between two people. More on that in a moment as well.
Finally, they reach the parents’ house, and Jake is just acting weird. Instead of going directly in, he wants to show the girlfriend around. Then, when they do go inside, the parents don’t show up right away and Jake is oddly quiet after being such a conversationalist. When the parents do come downstairs for dinner, they’re off-putting, to put it mildly. For example, the dad starts talking about the mom’s tinnitus and that she even talks back to the whispers? The mom also changes dresses between dinner and dessert. The dad has a BAND-AID over his eye, then later, a second BAND-AID. And again, Jake is oddly quiet. The weirdest part is when the parents ask the girlfriend to play a “game” where she impersonates Jake and Jake impersonates her. The girlfriend realizes how uncanny, and eerie, Jake’s impersonation of her is.
I should also mention, the girlfriend has a stalker of sorts she refers to as “The Caller” who keeps calling her leaving the same message over and over again. The weirdest part? He’s calling from her number. This Caller is obsessed with answering, or resolving, “one question.” (The question is asked at the end.) This Caller keeps calling her throughout the drive and the dinner at the parents’ house, but she keeps ignoring the call.
After Jake and the girlfriend leave for the night into a snowstorm, Jake inexplicably wants to stop at Dairy Queen where he doesn’t even get the Blizzard he wants. The woman who makes their drinks tells the girlfriend she’s scared for her. What is going on?! Then, even more inexplicable, Jake doesn’t want their drinks getting the cupholders sticky, so he suggests they go out of there way to stop at a nearby school and dispose of them there? He takes an inordinately long time disposing of the cups, then, when he returns, he wants to just stay there for a bit? Even though the girlfriend is bewildered by all of this, she accepts Jake’s advances when he starts kissing her. Just as it’s about to get hot and heavy, Jake flips out that the custodian inside the school is perversely watching them. He storms into the school to confront him, I suppose, leaving the girlfriend out in the cold.
I should reiterate at this point that the unnamed girlfriend has gone back and forth on whether to “end things” with Jake. Sometimes, she thinks she should have and this was all a mistake. Other times, she thinks Jake is quite swell and very intelligent. Also, throughout these scenes with Jake and the girlfriend, are short intermissions were unnamed parties are discussing a man who turned violent and what it portends for them. Those are the parts I definitely want to go back and re-read.
Anyhow, the girlfriend goes into the school after Jake and that’s when everything truly goes off the rails, with the girlfriend seeming to lose her mind. But in losing her mind, she rejoins her mind with Jake. That’s right, all of the book, including meeting the parents (who are actually dead), occurred inside Jake’s mind. I think. Prior, the “girlfriend” explained that she and Jake met in a pub. In Jake’s new telling, he never gave the girl his number and wonders what would have happened had he done so.
At the end of the book is a four-and-a-half page repetition of the same question, which I figure must be the question to be resolved: What are you waiting for? That’s when Jake “ends things” with a suicide, as I originally suspected the title meant.
What a mind-bender, and I’m not even sure I’m interpreting it correctly. But everything being inside Jake’s head makes sense of the title, “The Caller,” the stream of consciousness nature of the “conversation” with the girlfriend, the awkward parents because they’re dead, and the climactic mental unraveling at the school before committing suicide. This all makes Reid’s book more clever than it may have initially seemed.
I’d love to hear what others think about it! I’ll definitely have to dig deeper into the book again, though, and other books by Reid.
Milam's Musings 