REVIEW: HOT MILK

22 July 2018


'If anthropology is the study of humankind from its beginning millions of years ago to this day, I am not very good at studying myself."


Hot Milk is a coming of age drama unlike many others I have read. Sophie, or Sofia as her Greek name is spelt, has travelled to Almeria, Spain, in pursuit of the Gomez Clinic and the titular Dr Gomez in hopes of finding some cure for her mother's long-ailing legs.

From the beginning, it's clear the Sophie and her mother have a strained relationship and Sophie seems to live and feel as though her life is on hold, living to care for a mother that she doesn't seem fully convinced is actually ill at all. She's twenty-five and feels not only stuck but stagnated. Beginning their visits to the unusual and enigmatic Dr Gomez, the doctor's sessions are packed with questioning. He's an immensely interesting character, testing not just Rose's apparent illness but also her mindset with his conversations and unique humour. His sessions seem not just directed at Sophie's mother but at Sophie herself. "I do not believe you need more exercise," he says at one point, after commenting on her weakness. "It's a matter of having a purpose really, less apathy. Why not steal a fish from the market to make you bolder?" "Why do I need to be bolder," Sophie asks, well, "that is for you to answer," replies Gomez.

When Sophie finally does take Gomez's advice, doing something bold and challenging, her reaction to her surroundings seems to open up. "In the new quiet, I heard the sea as if my ears were laid against the ocean floor. I could hear everything. The rumbling earthquake of a ship and the spider crabs moving between the weeds". Levy dramatises how much our lives feel like they change once we do something to take more control, once we are active and no longer passive. It unlocks something in us and that's partly what coming of age is: it's unlocking a new way of seeing. Gomez himself epitomises this challenge in his sage advice. "You are using your mother as a shield to protect yourself from making a living. Medication is a ritual which I have now erased from both of your lives. Attention! You have to invent another one."

Despite the new experiences Sophie embarks on, involving the tempestuous Ingrid, Matty, and Juan the beach medic, among others, Sophie's life is tied to her mothers in a way that's both frustrating and inevitable. "Sometimes I find myself limping. It's as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother," but both she and Gomez seem to agree on one thing, that her mother's feet are on strike, "but I'm not sure what they're negotiating for."

As Sophie becomes bolder and more challenging she also uncovers a deep questioning and analysis of her own identity. Not only is she pulled between the heritage of her English mother and her own English name and that of her father's Greek heritage and her Greek name, Sofia, she begins to look at herself through the people surrounding her. Visting her father and his new family, she questions his new life and comes to the conclusion that she poses an "obstacle in his way" to forget his old life ever happened.

It seems to me that Sophie, like so many of us, is desperately trying to develop or at least understand her identity but struggling to do so amid the various influences. In one conversation with her father and his friend, he comments 'Sofia is a waitress, for the time being,' and she thinks, "I am other things too," mentally listing her degree, her shifting sexualities, her version of femininity. Like the Medusa jellyfish that often fill the coastal waters, Sophie often appears to drift with little control: her father wants to erase her, her mother to control her, and she imagines having only barriers of sand separating herself from others.


 For all Sophie's confusion about herself though, as Levy's novel progresses she becomes more and more adept at analysing those around her. There are several insightful and touching moments in which she strikes the truth of those around her, the lives they're living and the fears they run from. It's by doing this, by listening to others and to herself, that she begins to change. "It's up to you to break the old circuits," says an epigraph at the beginning and this epitomises in many ways what Sophie has to face up to.

It's novel of lessons, of deep internal wonderings, and the journey of self-discovery in a real and raw form, and, as Levy makes clear, a process unfinished one. Growth is not as simple as merely changing in one static movement, it's a long and difficult process. Coming of age as a concept itself is a process that never stops and Hot milk shows this in its every page.

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