Resi, the narrator of Higher Ground, is a writer, a wife, and a mother; middle-aged and raging against her own departed mother, she dreams of family while straining against the ideal of the nuclear. “Listen, Bea,” she begins, “the most important thing and the most awful, and the hardest to understand […] is this: nothing in life is black and white.” Bea is Resi’s eldest daughter and her audience, and Resi intends the book to be a kind of preparatory guide to life, where everything exists in a grey area, particularly Resi herself.

Previous to the events of Higher Ground, Resi has published a novel. It is never given a name, and no excerpts are offered, but we soon come to learn that her friends are implicated in it. She has outed them, turned their social lives inside out for public consumption. What’s worse, she is unapologetic. As a writer, Resi is as lucid as she is sarcastic: “The rule I had broken was: ‘Don’t wash your dirty laundry in public.’ It’s a nice phrase that holds families together.” Later, Resi briefly describes the novel: “In the darkest moment, instead of telling stories about the sun and the colours, I talked about how dark the moment was.” As we come to learn, stories are a double-edged sword for Resi.

The retaliation is severe. The flat where Resi lives with her husband, Sven, and their four children is owned by one of those implicated friends:

A letter came for me. It’s addressed to me and contains a neatly folded sheet of paper, which is the termination of the lease on our flat. No, that’s wrong. It’s a copy of the termination of the lease on our flat for my attention. Because our flat is really Frank’s; Frank’s name is on the contract, and he’s terminated the lease.

Higher Ground is a history of sorts, the expression of a desire to see things as they are. Resi is a deeply critical writer; she cannot let anything go, whether it’s her mother’s silence or the last word in a conversation. Her memories are ripe for picking, and for this kind of writer, they are the perfect food. “I can still remember the exact moment when I realised: Fuck! If my parents had lived somewhere else, we’d have had a different kitchen floor.” She is perpetually disturbing somebody’s status quo, by writing or remembering or arguing, and it is this combination of imagination, intellect and irritability that makes Resi both charismatic and incredibly hard to get along with.

Resi directs her stories at Bea, but the book is an obsession with Resi herself and her grievances. Resi mythologises constantly. She hates stories, but they teach her, so she prefers them to “the principles of a mythical ‘social consensus,’ which we call ‘common sense’ in a crude effort to make it seem plausible,” as if consensus were not a story, too. Her fascination with her own story frustrates the novel’s growth by subordinating plot to a montage of histories, manifestoes, revenge fantasies, memories. This makes sense, since Resi’s life has been upturned by telling the stories of others, and these vignettes do work as a magnetic centre. But Stelling winds the narrative around itself to the point that, apart from Bea, every other character feels like a shade, less a person and more a target.

The novel is largely concerned with freedom. There is the financial freedom of Resi’s friends, the freedom offered by the previous generation to allow “children to be free to follow [their] own path” — against which Resi has defined herself — and there is freedom from the “consensus,” from what can and cannot be said. Describing her upbringing among the wealthy, Resi comes to understand what their consensus is, and how they look down:

In those circles, people said that money didn’t buy happiness, property was a burden, and the rich didn’t enter the kingdom of heaven, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. […] But the rich people we knew were different and were just trying to stop suffering and inequality. And that’s why poor, innocent, non-homeowners like us — who were therefore morally superior — weren’t allowed to harp on about being poor, honest, and morally superior.

Stelling is down-to-earth and quick with her criticism of the liberal elite. Their hand-wringing over wealth, and Resi’s frustration because of it, feels fresh and earned. But for all the time she spends critiquing these ski-holidaying beneficiaries of inheritance, Resi just as readily looks down the ladder. She describes a woman peeing at the train station: “People walked past her, or stood right next to her, waiting for the lift […] She seemed alert, not drunk at all, just very dirty and fat, with several plastic bags filled to bursting.” On the next page, she confesses, “I am unwashed and ashamed […] I want to become the woman next to the lift. How did she manage to be so free?” But, of course, the woman is not free. Resi is as patronising as her friends, and when Resi eventually pisses in public herself, she is not outside the lift at a train station. She’s between two cars after a literary event.

If there is a legitimate freedom in the novel, it is writing — not literary performance, but the act itself. There is a deep satisfaction in watching Resi defy expectation and norm, frustrating those who wish she would just be thankful. When one of her friends refers to her as “muck,” something to be cleared out, Resi responds with a letter: “[T]his letter I’m writing to you is absurd: muck can’t write.” Stelling is unequivocal in this regard: Writing might ruin your social life and your mental health, and it might even leave you without a home. But what it always means is existing.

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