Among the many fragments of Franz Kafka’s stories, there is one about a prison cell with only three walls. The narrator does not know how he found himself in this prison, how he came to be naked, where he is, or what he could have done to deserve this fate. He can see only three stone walls; in front of him, where the fourth would be, a yawning gap appears in the misty void. No one keeps him in a cell. Her freedom is staring her in the face—but, terrified of the possibility of living outside, she can’t help but reach for it. He has effectively imprisoned himself. “Better to have nothing and do nothing,” he concludes, with the beds down in his castle.
One of the ideas that Kafka’s example conveys is that the prisoner is molded into the shape of their prison. This is especially true if, as in Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Thingsthe prison is an example of the society that built it. Wood is an Australian writer interested in how the constraints of civilization affect people—and what happens when the invisible rules that govern everyday life are rearranged. His Booker Prize-shortlisted novel from 2023, Stone Yard Worshipfollows a group of recluse monks who isolate themselves, alone, through the coronavirus pandemic. In The Natural Way of Thingsfirst published in 2015 and re-released this month by Riverhead, women who have been removed from their normal lives begin to discover what they can be once they are out of the control of men.
And Charlotte Wood
The novel’s characters—20 somethings that Wood often refers to as “girls”—wake up, sleepy and drugged, on a dilapidated farm somewhere in the Australian outback. Their rooms are closed, they are led on dog leashes, and they are dressed in “the wonderful costume of the old days”: burning woolen stockings, calico blouses, “old underwear,” and stiff leather boots. Those women are imprisoned, although they don’t know what or who.
Their prison is strange and useless. The farm buildings on the property—long porches, shearing sheds, and concrete sheds—are old and rotting, remnants of a time long before the herd showed up. The prisoners are watched over by two prison guards: Boncer, a “white-faced and ugly” misogynist, and Teddy, a diet-and-yoga white guy with dreadlocks, who complains a lot about his “neurotic” ex-boyfriend. These men are supported by Nancy, a woman who wears a nurse’s outfit but appears to have no medical training. The compound is surrounded by a tall electric fence that stretches beyond the horizon. The enclosure is large enough to accommodate packs of kangaroos, which can be seen hopping in the distance.
This unusual prison is designed to house unusual prisoners. His 10 inmates are strangers, but they eventually recognize each other from the news: Each was made the face of a national sex scandal. Wood tells us a bit about each woman—one, a contestant on a television singing competition, abused backstage; another was raped by a Catholic cardinal—but he emphasizes two points in particular. Yolanda, the child of a working-class mother, was attacked by a group of jocks; Verla was exploited by a prominent politician whom she still loves. All the women were taken into custody on the promise of a settlement; when they arrived to talk about the details, they were drugged and imprisoned in this ruined ranch by people whose identities and motives have never been completely clear.
The women now feel the shame of being lied to—a mental state that compounds and mirrors the shame they felt during their exposure. In the middle version of the book that gives the novel its title, Wood reflects on how, when a man sexually assaults a woman, the victim’s femininity—rather than their abuser’s masculinity—is always placed at the center of their story. “If the woman herself is the source of these things?” Wood writes. “As if the girls somehow, through the natural course of things, did it to themselves.” His novel rebukes such thinking and encourages his characters to rebuke themselves, though at the last moment, Wood loses his courage in a way that reflects the author’s growth over the past decade. During the many months of confinement, Verla and Yolanda are forced to change a lot—to reject the way they thought about themselves and their bodies. In the wilderness, they must change or die.
The natural way it was successful in Australia, winning two top awards and receiving nominations for several more. However, it did not receive much attention in the United States, where it ceased to be published. It shares a core and a set of thematic concerns with another late bloomer, the Belgian writer Jacqueline Harpman’s. I Who Never Knew Men. Harpman’s 1995 novel, popularized in the 2020s by TikTok, also follows a group of women captured by mysterious forces. No one can remember why they were imprisoned in an underground prison cell or who they were with before they were imprisoned for years. “They had husbands, lovers and children,” Harpman’s narrator points out. But “because they were too afraid to think about them because it was so painful, they had forgotten almost everything.” Harpman, who died in 2012, was a psychiatrist, and his writings deal with the mental damage caused by incarceration. Like the prisoner from Kafka’s piece, his characters have recreated themselves in the shape of their cell.
Wood’s book is small in scale, but full of color; much of his prose is beautiful and surprising. The natural way begins with a description of the kookaburra’s call, “powerful and crazy.” The ranch can be a harsh and brutal place, but the longer Verla and Yolanda stay there, the more they notice the beauty of the sky and the beautiful landscape. When food runs low, Yolanda starts trapping rabbits. Verla, meanwhile, gets to know many types of mushrooms in the outback, playing with different mushrooms in hopes of getting revenge on the cruel Boncer.
A prison is a quiet environment, so in order to maintain the pace, the writer of this type of story must provide events and insights. Harpman does this by freeing his captives, placing them in a post-apocalyptic environment in which they must understand—and survive—alone. This triggers a rediscovery of part of what they had forgotten in the act of self-defense. But Wood’s prison is more stable. The months are moving; power goes out; the prisoners and the prison guards seem to have been abandoned by their mysterious superiors. Verla falls ill and has a rapturous vision of the animal world, while Yolanda goes wild; at last he is almost mute, and walks in dry rabbit skins.
In other words, these women are approaching Kafka’s fourth wall, a strange way—if not from the ranch, then at least from the boundaries that bound them home. Yet unlike Harpman, Wood does not take that last step. Again and again, we are told that Yolanda is a wild girl and Verla is an educated liberal who puts herself above others; any new perspective they gain is governed by the narrow demands of Wood’s didactic story. Verla is badly served; she holds on to the belief that her political lover will help her for a long time—until, suddenly, the scales fall from her eyes. This is quite believable, in the sense that many people take years to recognize abuse. Still, because his epiphany is motivated not by Verla’s psychology but by the basic needs of the plot, it is unconvincing. Any changes that occur reflect the character’s violent transformation into a symbol, not the perfection of reality or the vividness of fiction.
This limits The natural way as a novel; worse, it severely undercuts the impact of Wood’s criticism. He wants us to see how a society that treats women as inferior by nature, exploits and despises them. Unfortunately, its plot confines these characters to another narrow set of roles, and most of them are shown to be unable to leave their castle. The novel ends with a group of women happily giving up their lives in exchange for small bags of luxury cosmetics—an example so reductive and demeaning that it seems like misogyny. How else to read this moment but as the culmination of the “natural way of things,” which is blamed on modern, commercial women? They may also be doing it to themselves.
If I were to be kind, I would say that Wood only reproduces oppressive social structures in fiction in order to expose them. But I know that he can handle this problem better, because he already has. Wood’s later novel, Stone Yard Worshipit focuses on another band of women in a remote area—nuns working to keep their abbey, cut off from the world because of the coronavirus pandemic. The story is told by an unnamed narrator, a secular woman who has joined the nuns as a laywoman after her faith in environmentalism crumbled. He is not always open-minded about his hosts; sometimes they even misbehave. But the novel can provide an ongoing vein of suspense, opening up space for these other people to act the way they do, to be the way they are—and for a deeply human story of failure to continue to blossom.
Characters of Stone Yard Worship they are all trying to survive without causing unnecessary harm. Yet they often disagree about what an ethical life might look like, and how many people can be expected to live up to one woman’s standards. In The natural wayearlier work, such misunderstandings are found to provide a clean narrative account of the forces that separate women from themselves. Today, Wood no longer seems interested in reducing differences to the level of ideology. If the solution is to be found, Wood seems to be saying, it must lie in recognizing what parts of the prison already exist within us, and breaking through the wall.
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