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The nurses at the facility are her adversaries.
Their job was to keep people in; Vivians job was to get them out.
She sees the judge concur.
Vivians solidarity with her clients, we soon discover, goes beyond empathy; she identifies with them.
It is hand in glove with the patriarchal order.
The friends get high,watchUnsolved Mysteries, and spin their stories of survival into comedy.
But as the novel unfurls, Vivians humor and single-mindedness are revealed to be tenuous coping mechanisms.
As her grip on this veneer of total control begins slipping,Post-Traumaticspirals into chaos.
A terrible family reunion is the novels (and Vivians) fracture point.
What follows is a reckoning.
Yes, this is a trauma novel.
Post-Traumaticisnt reinventing the wheel nor does it seem to wish to.
Still, it suggests that the trauma plot can be much more surprising than Sehgal and others imagine.
Writing in a close third person, Johnson invites us to identify with Vivian and morally cosign her motives.
In crisis, Vivian quits her job, abandoning her clients.
She sets out to wreck the life of an old antagonist.
And she unceremoniously cuts off contact with her family.
)Post-Traumatictakes a knowing and nuanced stance toward the ways trauma intersects with American racial politics.
Vivians worldview is inextricable from her status as a Black and Puerto Rican woman from a working-class background.
At one moment, Vivian dissociates, seeing the entire history of Black suffering.
She decides to dose Pauline with a powerful weed strain and fuck her husband.
The sanctity of Elliotts marriage was a nonissue, Vivian tells herself.
Ethics were a nonissue … She didnt care what happened to anyone, herself included.
Here we find ourselves abandoned within the traumatized mind, experiencing the way Vivian now navigates the world.
Doubt blooms of Vivian, ourselves, both.
Her empathy has gone haywire.
Even she can see she has gone over to the dark side.
Despite the heaviness of the material,Post-Traumaticis highly readable.
Johnsons writing is witty and maximalist, with detailed scene descriptions and hyperverbal, culturally tuned-in dialogue.
A clear foremother forPost-Traumaticis Sylvia PlathsThe Bell Jar.
Plath first published her book in the U.K. in 1963, under a pseudonym.
Like that book,Post-Traumaticreveals sociopolitical rot by way of one womans crack-up.
Ambiguity, muses Vivian, was horrifying in real life.
Yet it is ambiguity that givesPost-Traumaticits power.
