Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk is a particularly symbolic book. Taking place in Almeria, Spain over a few summer months in 2015, the novel follows Sofia, the daughter of an English woman from Yorkshire and a Greek man from Athens, as she tries to figure herself out amidst a failed Anthropology PhD, and a cast of characters trying to fuck her or fuck her over.
She’s in Almeria to help her ailing mother, Rose, whose legs have mysteriously stopped working and for which there appears to be no medical cause. In Spain is the bizarre Dr. Gomez, and his daughter who goes by the nickname Nurse Sunshine, “as if it were normal for an eminent doctor who specialized in musculoskeletal conditions to name his staff after the weather.” Their treatment of Rose is patently psychological, rather than clearly medical, despite his pretenses as a medical doctor. He asks her to write a “list of [her] enemies,” and hires her a car to drive to and from appointments even though her legs don’t work. Meanwhile, Sofia meets a German couple, Ingrid and Matthew, who attempt to seduce her either out of boredom, or to get closer to Dr. Gomez whose experiments have caught the eye of the Spanish pharmaceutical industry with whom Matthew is affiliated. All of this sounds quite thrilling.
The prose, however, proves quite slimy and languid as Sofia observes much of this in bewilderment. Sofia remarks early on that if she were to look at her mother a certain way she would “turn her to stone,” like Medusa. She corrects herself: no, not Rose literally into stone, but “the language of allergies, dizziness, heart palpitations, and waiting for side effects to stone. [She] would kill this language stone dead.” Sofia wishes to take the ways in which Rose has formed her sense of self and remove life from them. Rose’s character is defined by these things, her illness and its attendant cures and ameliorations. Underlying here is her Englishness. Yorkshire origins, then, take an initial back seat—this is 2015 after all, the Brexit vote is around the corner. The years of fallout await. Still, she has the hardnosed calm and resolve of a Midlands woman: speaking to Dr. Gomez, she says, “‘I could have gone to Devon for less than one hundred pounds and sat by the sea with a packet of biscuits on my lap, patting one of many English dogs. You are more expensive than Devon. I am, frankly, disappointed.’”
As opposed to Sofia who straddles her split Greek and English parentage, the other principal characters retain national certainty and almost obvious characteristics. Ingrid and Matthew speak down to Sofia and tell her how to behave. When Sofia arrives with pizza, Ingrid pokes Sofia’s stomach with cardboard and commands her to “eat more salad.” Ingrid has a “taste for symmetry and structure,” a satiric German quality. The chapters are interpolated with single paragraphs of Ingrid’s observations of Sofia, which gift Ingrid interiority where only brutish actions exist from Sofia’s point of view, and they destabilize the narrow, slow burning plot. They approach a clinical anthropologist’s notes, the observer, Sofia, has become the observed: “When the Greek girl speaks, her accent is English, but her hair is black like the bread my father eats with salted lard and mustard.”
The writing suggests that though the novel appears to be a young twenties coming of tale, it is anything but that. Early on Sofia is stung by a jellyfish, which she learns the Spanish call “medusa” for their nasty, dangerous tentacles resembling the Greek myth. Sofia is part Greek, is she part Medusa? If she is dangerous, the narrative presents her as castrated, alienated from her force in the world, disassociated from her supposed grand future. She has a degree in anthropology and dreams of a PhD, but works in a café in London.
They “roast [their] own beans and make three types of artisanal espresso….so [she doesn’t] know what to put under ‘Occupation’” on medical forms (ellipsis in original). On her mother, Sofia wishes to “blow on her name ROSE” so that “the letters would shuffle around and come out as EROS, the god of love, winged but lame.” Each thing refers to another.
As Dr. Gomez’s work proceeds successfully, Sofia notes that her mother is not “numb. She is acutely sensitive,” a description that for me recalled the Keats poem “In drear nighted December,” and the stanza “Writh’d not of passed joy?/the feel of not to feel it,/when there is none to heal it/nor numbed sense to steel it,/was never said in rhyme.” Levy constructs a mother-daughter relationship not devoid of feeling, but so oversaturated with it, both become paralyzed: Rose physically and Sofia in her life’s progress. This is the Freudian story of Hot Milk.
When Sofia decides to visit her father in Athens, Christos (newly married to a younger woman), the novel’s symbols extend beyond the page into the larger European political climate of 2015. The young wife, Alexandra, wearing braces and animal shoes, declares that Sofia appears “anti-austerity.” Alexandra, however, declares she’s conservative, preferring “to take the medicine of reforms. We [the Greek people] cannot come off our medication if we want to stay in the eurozone. [Christos] has taken most of his money out of the bank and put it in a British bank. We don’t know what is going to happen.” The simple wife sets out to give Sofia “a lecture” so she interrupts to check in on Alexandra’s credentials. Turns out the new young wife has an impressive resume of economic work across Europe. Alexandra’s diligence and belief in the European reforms of the Greek welfare state refract then back to the two German’s in our narrative, the structured and straight forward Ingrid and Matthew.
Hot Milk rather than being a bildungsroman is a symbolic political dance of European proportions. At the center is the half-Greek, half-English Sofia. Her father’s side, the lay about dilettantes, coasting on the founding of Western civilization for thousands of years, and on her mother’s half is the bizarre monarchy island of imperial reach, who was only ever partially committed to Europe as an idea with them included, and always committed to the idea of a Europe to scoff at. Rose, the woman from Yorkshire, a cranky Brexit “Leave” Voter if there ever was one, who can walk sometimes and can’t others. Her disability is fabricated, or psychological: her castration exists as a defense; she can walk when its required of her. All her complaining of ailment and she may just be in her own way.
By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that Rose has decided to kill herself, rather than face the world. Dr. Gomez’s treatments have given her the courage to face her own destruction, the thing she truly desires.
The setting offers the clearest example of Levy’s sly Brexit narrative. Almeria, a beach town, was historically a place of cross-cultural mingling and warfare under the Muslim rule of Spain. Where else should the clash of European cultures play out as a metaphorical narrative of one’s inability to progress in life than in Spain, Greece’s cousin in Southern European welfare decadence? There, the English and Germans scheme and extract, attempting to tame the unruly elements of the Spanish: Dr. Gomez delivers a “cure” to Rose even while Matthew attempts to have the authorities close his practice, and Sofia rediscovers her love of anthropology by observing these characters, deciding to abandon Europe together and head state side.
The extent to which Levy’s spinning of this Freudian and European drama coheres can be questioned, but the use of character as symbols often hollows out the narrative, leaving a bit too much emotional white space. Whereas someone like Dostoevsky has characters lay out their ideologies in long, cavernous speeches, Levy seems more interested in received cultural or political notions of the reader entering the text. The lesson here, such as one exists, or rather the thing I find so interesting about this novel’s mode, is the ways in which Levy allows her hand to be shown. Things arrive on the page well-drawn and peculiar—the setup is too conventional to not be strange. Sofia’s efforts to draw out meaning from the people in her orbit reinvigorates her anthropological spirit, but if that’s the end of the story it has the entertainment of spinning tops and watching them collide. Instead, what Levy has on offer attempts to refract assumptions, the same ones that may provide insight into the work, so as to illuminate the essential staggered and halting nature of human relations, especially in the kettle logic of the family. Sofia tries to kill her mother which ends up releasing her mother’s desire to kill herself. Sofia sleeps with Ingrid, maybe falls in love. The question at the novel’s center isn’t about what one should do next in the world, its asking the old psychoanalytic insight—why do people stop doing things, even when they feel good? Why not, just do them again? Have a lesbian romance, leave Europe, make coffee, go to the beach.