What The Safekeep Doesn't Say

On the limits of genre and the politics of possession

Note: Major spoilers for The Safekeep lie ahead. If you plan on reading the book I suggest holding off on this because that book is best read with *very* minimal information going in.

I like to think they’d read this together

I bought The Safekeep by Yael Van der Wouten last Saturday after hearing good things about it from virtually everyone. Nikki Giovanni died earlier in the week, and the discourse had shifted from her impact to her having a white wife. Or maybe it had started there. I can't remember. When I brought it to the counter at Book Culture in Long Island City, the bookseller was enthusiastic. It's really good, he said, becoming the ninth person to say some version of that in a week. I picked it up after finishing Lazarus Man (kaleidoscopic, well-written, aimless) and didn't put it back down. I was glued to its pages. It's well-written and well-plotted, and there were a few stretches where I decided to quit writing altogether; a sign that the book is good. The novel takes place in 1960s Netherlands and opens with a dinner between siblings. Our main character, Isabel, is essentially a hermit, living alone in their family home in the Dutch countryside while her brothers Hendrik and Louis experience the full textures of life. As he is wont to do, her brother Louis brings his new girlfriend Eva with him to dinner. Isabel is not impressed by her—if anything, she is deeply turned off by her presence—and is openly rude to Eva throughout the meal. A week later, Louis tells her that Eva is coming to stay at the house, which Isabel balks at, but she is powerless to stop this because Louis is the inheritor of the estate. It is in these early pages that we learn about Isabel's temperament. She is paranoid (she thinks the maid Neelke is stealing her mother's china), perpetually angry, and pent-up. She lives a quiet life and has no friends. Her social life consists of occasional dinners with her brothers, visits to an aunt, and dinners with the neighbor with a son who seems to assault Isabel whenever he sees her. Eva's arrival disrupts all that. At first, Isabel is angry at everything that Eva does and overwhelmed by her presence. Things change when Eva brings home pears for them to eat. Shortly after, the seed of desire takes hold, shifting their relationship and the trajectory of the novel.

Van der Wouten has a talent for writing, yearning, desire, and sex and has impressive control of the book's narrative. I was compelled by Isabel's realization of her queerness and witnessing someone's desire take hold for the first time. It was exciting to watch them skirt around this clear thing between them. The tension is delicious. Beat for beat, it's a romance. Tropes abound. Grumpy/sunshine, one bed, forbidden love. There's even a third-act conflict where the characters have reached a point of no return, only for them to live happily ever after. But it's the very promise of the romance genre—the complicated made neat— that chokes the novel's big twist, which resists tidy resolution despite The Safekeep's desire to wrap it up.