This article first appeared in Book Gossip, a newsletter about what we’re reading and what we actually think about it. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every month.
When you’re telling a story that doubles as an argument for human rights, it must be tempting to cast the scene with ideal players. The tough but compassionate abortion doctor. The desperate patient who arrives at the clinic with a convincing set of reasons for ending her pregnancy. The counterprotester who’s brave and articulate enough to shout down the people who stand outside yelling. The ethical reporter there to chronicle it all.
Hilary Plum’s new novel, State Champ, is definitely arguing for something, but its characters don’t always seem up to the task of effecting change. Rather than being aligned in their beliefs, they’re scattered, ambivalent, at odds. That’s part of what makes the book so interesting. I sat down thinking I would read the first 20 or 30 pages and ended up finishing it in a single sitting. It’s narrated by Angela, the receptionist at a women’s-health clinic in an unnamed U.S. state. Not long before the story begins, the clinic’s doctor is arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison; she was in violation of a draconian new heartbeat law. Angela has returned to the boarded-up facility to go on a hunger strike, a process she details in letters written to an ex-hookup of hers named John who works for a local newspaper.
But Angela wasn’t a well-liked employee, and she isn’t especially clear about her reasons for being there. John doesn’t want to write about her stunt, not that he’s a particularly good journalist anyway. (“Do you even read the paper I write for?” he says at one point. “Where ads for colon cleansers pop up after every sentence and every article is only like 6 sentences long?”) And the clinic’s physician, Dr. M, doesn’t have much in the way of bedside manner — at least not with her receptionist, toward whom she is openly antagonistic. “In my heart you are fired,” Angela remembers her boss saying after she makes a minor scene in front of some potential donors.
In a different sort of story, Angela’s protest would open up some rapport between the two women, but Dr. M, whose release Angela is demanding, isn’t flattered when she hears about the hunger strike. “She said to thank you, but she said it’s not necessary,” says another doctor who comes to check on Angela after her story is picked up for a couple of half-hearted local news reports. Nor does it appear likely that Angela’s demand will be met, as people (her aunt, a protester, the journalists she talks to) keep reminding her. But that doesn’t seem to be the point. “Not everyone needs hope. It doesn’t seem like you do,” that same doctor says. As she did when she was a high-school track star, Angela is capable of shrugging off pain and discomfort so she can keep trudging forward. In America after Dobbs, the result of all that discomfort may be a humiliating nothing. So what does it mean to take action in a time of no hope?
Plum, a writing professor at Cleveland State, has written about protest before; her first three books are partly about American apathy during the war on terror, and her most recent is a collection of essays on labor and health care. (In one novel, she imagines a Weather Underground–style group in the early aughts, something that, obviously, did not exist.) Until now, her work was put out by smaller houses. State Champ is published by the relatively mainstream Bloomsbury, but it’s still rough around the edges in a way that satisfies a reader’s reality hunger: polemical, jagged, and as imperfect as its narrator.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Part of that has to do with its structure. Angela gets hungrier as the pages turn. After a certain point, disoriented and weak, she stops making much sense, and by the end of the book she has given up on punctuation. But before that, with too much time to scrawl on the scraps of paper left around the office, she writes about whatever comes to mind. For someone who’s prepared to stare death in the face, she’s surprisingly funny, and her letters run on jokes as much as political arguments. She chides John about his misunderstanding of their relationship — “You wasted so much time apologizing totally insincerely for not being the good boyfriend you should have known I didn’t want,” she says — and zooms back in time, remembering old track meets and the last journal she kept, an eating-disorder-driven record of calories consumed and expended. She talks about the nurses she worked alongside, most of whom now believe she ratted out Dr. M, and the professional anti-abortion protester Janine who posted up outside (and “looked like she worked a graveyard shift at the smile factory”). She describes the parade of patients who showed up at her desk looking unsteady or anxious or totally unfazed. And she fantasizes about eating food: a coffee milkshake, honey mustard with seeds in it, bright-orange popcorn, “something like hot broth, rainbowy fat on the surface, little carrot shards.”
Abrasive and impatient, she has managed to offend most of the people around her. “I’ve been told I need to work on my ‘communication skills.’ Also my ‘people skills.’ Which is it, people?” she says. The qualities that make her off-putting, though, are the same that make her able to go on the hunger strike. She’s used to not eating, and she’s suspicious of authority figures and difficult to embarrass. Vibrating with failure, still grieving the long-ago death of her mother, and prone to impulsive decisions, she’s got the nihilism necessary for the task. “You’re a girl who’s prepared for bad news,” someone tells her. “I feel like I finally have the right job,” she writes on day 19 of the fast.
In the earlier chapters when Angela is just a surly fuckup with an idea, she’s irresistible as a narrator: judgmental, impetuous, and hilariously rude. As the book goes on, Plum layers on the backstory and exposes her narrator to fresher traumas, like a dangerous encounter with a police officer in the empty clinic. At times, she uses her character as the mouthpiece for a series of ideas that can seem like an awkward mouthful. It’s all an attempt at psychological depth, but it risks having the opposite effect, diluting Angela’s oppositional spark with too much explanation.
There’s enough of that opposition, though, to power a post-Dobbs novel we’re lucky to have, one that really wrestles with the place of abortion in an imperfect world. “Glow, everyone says that about pregnant women. Lots of people look fucking sick,” Angela writes. When the anti-abortion protester Janine shows up at the clinic, Angela accuses her of not living in the real world, the one where bodies get away from us and do things we don’t want them to do. It’s not the kind of book in which someone like Angela has a chance at convincing someone like Janine. But it lets her try.
