There’s a scene early in Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, The Safekeep, that feels as if it’s dripping off the page. The main character’s hands and arms are stained with the juice of a pear—eaten whole—and with each line, the reader’s limbs, somehow, feel equally drenched. When I ask van der Wouden about this scene, we’re sitting across from each other in a bright and busy Brooklyn coffee shop. (The trendy Williamsburg haunt is just one of many stops she’s making on a brief trip to the U.S. from the Netherlands.) Her face turns mischievous. “Can I tell you what I said to myself after I wrote that scene?” she asks, leaning in closer. “I paused for a moment, then I chuckled, and I said, ‘You little freak.’”
I concede that the scene is in fact, a little freaky (though the sexy kind of “freaky,” not the scary kind). The revelation of the pear comes as a surprise, both to readers and to van der Wouden’s tightly wound, very Dutch protagonist, Isabel, whose life is a series of carefully maintained routines and strict lines—until her brother’s girlfriend, Eva, unexpectedly comes to stay. We are sure that Isabel hates Eva, the loud and seemingly duplicitous woman who handed her the fruit and has taken up an unwelcome residence in her home. Isabel’s suspicions are our suspicions until this moment of consumption, which van der Wouden paints with a somewhat aloof sense of horror and eroticism. It’s a turning point in the book. Suddenly, disgust is desire and disdain is longing. Readers immediately understand The Safekeep is both exactly what we thought it was and not what we expected at all.
That van der Wouden manages this constant contradictory tension, walking both her characters and audience on a perfectly balanced tightrope, is perhaps why Lauren Wein, editorial director at Avid Reader Press, referred to The Safekeep as “one of the most self-assured debuts I’ve ever read.” The book is at once a gothic horror set in the Dutch countryside; an almost claustrophobic romance between two deeply flawed women; a treatise on displacement and the aftermath of genocide; and a poetic rumination on what is lost when we refuse to acknowledge the truths simmering beneath our everyday lives. And yet, the novel never winds or drags. Throughout, van der Wouden’s plot and characters all revolve tightly around one axis: Isabel’s family home.
When I marvel aloud at the confidence and boldness of her writing, van de Wouden scoffs a little. “When I hear that, what I try to do is unpack what that means,” she says. “And I think what that means, usually, is the fact that [the book] has a very tight plot.” For the ability to build such a closely held, believably rendered world, the author credits her parents, who are both animators. Growing up in their house, her first introduction to storytelling was visual. “Before I was reading, long before I was writing, movies were kind of the lingua franca at home,” she says. She watched her parents move their ideas from storyboard to finished product and learned, early on, how to plot with economy and efficiency.
And what about Isabel’s family home, which is at once character, setting, and allegory in this post-WWII story? The characters rarely leave its halls, obsessively attended to by Isabel and coveted by her love interest, Ava. Was this also a place plucked out of van der Wouden’s own childhood? Yes and no. The house is based on a real vacation home in the south of the Netherlands, where she once stayed. But she was deathly ill there, somewhat tortured by the beauty of the home as her body recovered. The duality, of beauty beside queasy discomfort, reflects van der Wouden’s relationship with the Netherlands since she moved there as a child from Israel. “I had a friend who read this book, she’s Dutch, and she said, ’I’ve never read anyone write about the Dutch landscape so romantically,’” van der Wouden says. It’s an irony that doesn’t escape her. “When I was 16, I mean I hated that place,” she says. “I despised it. I really, really hated it.”
As a teenager, van der Wouden was bullied in school and often found herself on the periphery of social circles. The books she read were too weird (“I was reading, like, Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”); her Dutch was too imperfect; and she was a little too poor for her wealthy classmates. “My parents, they lived on the edge of the city,” she says. “I would bike to the point where there were no more cars. All you could see was farmland and the landscape that Isabel is describing. I just pretended like I wasn’t in the here and now. That’s what I would do, for years on end. I just wanted to escape so badly. I think a lot of that is in the book. It’s romantic, but it’s miserable.”
Ahead, van der Wouden shares her further thoughts on duality, complicity, unlikeable characters, and—of course—sex in The Safekeep.
I don’t like Isabel. And yet I’m rooting for her by the end of the book. I want her to win. I want her to understand. I’m curious about how you write unlikeable characters with compassion. How do you make them whole while still making them unlikable?
The one thing that takes me out of a story the quickest is when I feel that the writer actually dislikes one of their characters. When they want to write a “bad,” like an evil person, and they do it in the flattest way possible. What it does for me is it reminds me that there’s a person with opinions and thoughts directing the whole thing.
I feel the hand of the writer. You’re jolted out of the fantasy, you’re jolted out of the social contract that you have with the book, which is like, “We’re gonna pretend that this is real, even though we both know that it’s not.” The moment that I can feel the author filtering through and saying things and feeling things and trying to convince me of things, I get snapped out of it.
I think, for me, what is very important is to love every single character. Even the bad ones. Even the worst ones.
The reason why I wanted to write Isabel that way is—I have read so many stories, and especially about this period and about the Holocaust, written from the perspective of victimhood, from the question of victimhood, consideration of victimhood. And I think the danger of that is that you have an entire canon that encourages people to identify with victimhood and not come to understand how they themselves might become perpetrators.
Yeah.
And with Isabel, I don’t think she’s a perpetrator in a classic sense, but I wanted to create a character that is not likable, who is prejudiced, but not because she doesn’t know things, right? She has Hendrick, she has Sebastian [her gay brother and his mixed-race partner], she has these things around her that should make her more understanding of otherness. And she’s not, right? She’s still ignorant in a way. I didn’t want to give her that get-out-of-jail-free card. I wanted to take all of that, and I wanted to rip her open at the seams.
Which you succeeded in doing.
Great fun. Had a lovely time. I wanted to take the reader from a point of, first you dislike her, then slowly, slowly you come to understand her layers, and you come to understand her desires and the way that she’s been repressed. Toward the end of part two, you’re just like, “I cannot believe that I’m rooting for her, but I am rooting for her.”
I don’t want to sound like [The Safekeep] is an educational novel, but I think it is much more educational to have a character who’s not very good, and then learns how to be good, but then has to relearn it all over again in different facets of her life. Everything about her must change, you know, for her to get to the ending. Not her personality, though.
I think that makes the sex scenes even more amazing because—back to the point about your “self-assured debut”—I think Isabel in the bedroom is so much more assured than in every other aspect of her life.
The way I envisioned her is that she is an obsessive person. And whenever she focuses on something, she will do that, like, 300 percent. Be it cleaning the curtains, keeping the house in order, washing those dishes every year, or taking care of the garden. No matter what it is, she will do it fully and completely.
I think with her, love is the same. That single-minded focus, that same obsession, is an integral part of her personality. And what happens once Eva comes along, it cracks her open. All that focus flips to Eva. In those days, she doesn’t pay attention to the house that much anymore.
That’s how I wanted to write her: I wanted to set her up as an obsessive person.
So I saw her obsession and Eva’s single-mindedness as born out of trauma, both of them, right? We don’t witness their horrible pasts in real time, but they are a shadow in every interaction. How do you think about writing that trauma?
The way I explain it is, Isabel has grown up feeling completely deserted. She has her one obsession, her one goal in life, and that’s this house, and no one gets it. Except for this person who comes in and suddenly gets it.
On the flip side, there’s Ava, who has felt invisible for most of her adult life, and suddenly there’s this person who will not look away. In a terrible way, she feels obsessed with her, but on the other hand, once it flips over into desire, into romance, the way Isabel perceives of her fits so neatly into exactly what she has been desiring all this time and what has, you know, created so much of her trauma: this loneliness and this invisibility. They complete each other in this way that is only allowed through their traumas. I also think, thank God that they found each other.
There is a huge theme of displacement in the book. There’s no way to talk about that displacement without thinking about the current displacement in Palestine. I want to know your thoughts on how this book speaks to that. I think particularly of the sense of left behind-ness, the remnants of a life that are ignored.
This is what the story is about. It’s about displacement, and it’s about the way that we think about ownership. Loving a place does not make us the owners of it. What I’m really afraid of is that people will read this and be like, “Naive Yael, thinking that we can all live in one house and only love could save us at the end of the day.” I know it’s not that simple. I know it’s not that, but it is what I wanted for these characters.
Also because that’s the history of me. That’s the history of where I come from [van de Wouden’s mother is an Israeli citizen; her father is Dutch]. And these are the two histories of displacement that I’ve, sort of, both lived through and had in my history. The story is about Isabel herself having to deal with complicity. I embody those two ends of the spectrum: both complicity on the one hand and, on the other hand, also a history of victimhood. Both of them are within me and that’s not even counting my Dutch grandmother, who was born in Indonesia and was part of a colonial system.
Within me, there’s all of that and all of that is also in this book.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.