Accismus

Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands is a novel about a girl and her asshole. No, really – exhaustively and all the way through, this novel centers on 18-year-old Helen Memel’s butchered asshole. Having nicked something major during her regular and highly involved shaving routine, Helen is lying in a hospital bed “with my skirt hiked up and my underpants pulled down, ass toward the door.” But she’s not embarrassed about that, or anything else. While she lies there in recovery, Helen ruminates obsessively on her favorite themes – her body, its byproducts and the fun she can have with them. All of this is shockingly explicit, but if you ask yourself why it’s shocking, being (as it is) so utterly everyday and banal a subject (essentially, a long version of ‘everybody poops’), you get closer to Roche’s ultimate purpose.

Wetlands is essentially a protest novel. Helen is merely particularly interested in her body; Roche, on the other hand, is furious that Helen’s interests and comfort with herself could be as rare and shocking as they (to many) are. True, all bodily functions are hidden, but some are more hidden than others – specifically, women’s. Roche’s target here is the sanitized woman: society’s obsession with hair removal, its primitive taboos about menstruation and vaginal cleanliness, its commercial tendency to tiptoe around women’s genitalia with cutesy, pink crap, as though vaginas themselves are an inside joke.

Undoubtedly, bodily secretions are nothing to be ashamed of; whether or not they are interesting is another question altogether. As Helen prods, picks at and wipes herself continuously, the book becomes tedious. Other people’s fluids, like their dreams and their college photo albums, are ultimately of no interest to anyone but themselves. Helen also has family drama and a new love interest, and she is scared and alone and putting on a brave face, but these plot points were clearly thought up after Roche settled on her theme. They feel tacked on, and the ending takes a leap into the surreal that is entirely unjustified by the chapters leading up to it.

Which isn’t to say Wetlands doesn’t have something to offer. Helen is an endearing and original character. And as a feminist howl, the book succeeds – Roche’s point is certainly a valid one that needs to be made more often. Still, she probably could have made it just as well in a ten-page short story.