Pond

What happens in Pond? Almost nothing; less than nothing, you're tempted to say. The smart young Irish woman who narrates Bennett's debut novel has zero ambition, but she tells herself, "if you don't do something today, now, how will you find out anything about how you feel?" And feel she does, in a curious, bewildered, investigative way, and out of her indolence she spins monologues that make the smallest things—soup, oranges, broken stove knobs, men—seem immensely strange. If you love the singer Courtney Barnett as much as I do and wonder what it would be like if she narrated a Virginia Woolf novel, Pond gives you an idea.