Levitation For Beginners

By Suzannah Dunn
Fiction/Abacus/Paperback/260 pages/$29.65/Kinokuniya SG (str.sg/ffrq)
2 stars

Reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Shards (2023), except transplanted to the 10- and 11-year-old demographic, Suzannah Dunn’s Levitation For Beginners promises murder and mystery in small-town England. Except this iteration contains hardly any tension, with the last 50 pages of the book – where the action suddenly escalates – abruptly appended on.

At the centre is 10-year-old Deborah, who intuits rather than fully comprehends the goings-on around her. She and her classmates eke out a peaceable, unexamined existence in the 1970s in their two-classroom Home Counties school, until the entry of glamorous Sarah-Jayne, speaking of vodka at 11 and boasting about buying a bra at a department store.

Immediately, the group’s mean-girls instincts kick in, forming cliques, awaiting approval for their opinions and finally paying attention to the two boys in their class.

The conceit, now-and-then casually hinted at, is Deborah’s suspicion that Sarah-Jayne’s precocity may not be the gift her classmates make it out to be and holds a darker secret. Once the new girl herself, she bristles at her friends now “falling in line behind this cruel-eyed new girl” whose head, she thinks, is “stuffed full of magazines”.

Not that she does any active investigation. Her own imagination is also expanded by the exotic phrases Sarah-Jayne drops – “Going out”? Where are they going? – and this love-hate dynamic leads her to begin chafing against her own hard-nosed single mother, whose Scottishness and withholding of tenderness she starts to have qualms about.

All this culminates in a scandal – and, yes, a death – but the loose welding of these tragedies with the rest of the novel’s proceedings means neither has much emotional meaning, except to create a coming-of-age secret for Deborah.

Dunn, for the most part, is interested only in the micro-interactions between girls in their early teens, which she does exceedingly well – their unspoken loyalties, the fickleness of favour, semi-understood humour, fledgling desire.

Yet, the smallness of these concerns also means readers’ eyes tend to skate over the easy-going prose, registering a string of subtle moments that are less than the sum of their parts.

All are embodied in the titular levitation that the girls try very hard to execute – an empty prank meant to fill time, with some more aware than others of its essential meaninglessness.

If you like this, read: My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld (Faber & Faber, 2024, $23, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/49UXh22). This story is about a girl’s upbringing through the eyes of an elder man who grooms her, written with much more stakes and tension.