Sometimes there is a moment—in the most fantastic of arguments—when someone stretches beyond the confines of their individual circumstances and grasps at a larger truth. For Eva de Haas, a young woman in 1960s Amsterdam, her fury in the middle of one fight morphs into a greater critique of the social amnesia she observes across the Netherlands in the aftermath of World War II. “No one ever knows anything in this country,” Eva proclaims. “No one knows where they live, who did what, who went were. Everything is a mystery.”
When does a mystery become an act of willful blindness? Writer Yael van der Wouden’s debut novel, The Safekeep (Avid Reader Press, 2024), wrestles with this very question, starting with Isabel den Brave, the protagonist, literally unearthing a piece of the past in her family’s garden: a ceramic shard. Isabel, who lives alone on the property, is perplexed by the artifact. It bears the same hare pattern as her mother’s beloved, rarely-used China plates—but she cannot imagine who would’ve broken a plate and then buried it in the backyard.
A seemingly minor mystery, Isabel can’t relinquish the shard or the puzzle it creates for her, so she brings it to one of her two brothers, Hendrick, before a dinner. He reminds her that when they first moved into the house, fleeing a famished Amsterdam during the winter of 1944 for the quiet province of Overijssel, the place was already furnished, although neither can remember how, or why. Their speculation is cut short by the arrival Louis, the eldest brother, who arranged the evening to introduce his new girlfriend, Eva. The mystery related to the house is completely derailed by Eva’s poor first impression—a shoddy peroxide dye-job and ill-fitting dress, which, combined with her ignorance of the finer things (there is an uncomfortable exchange about whether a scallop is a potato), provokes Isabel to cruelly tell Eva she’ll never last with Louis. Although she notices a flash of something in Louis’s girl, there’s something she can’t quite put her finger on—yet.
Van der Wouden’s talent for careful plotting is already well at work in these opening pages. It is tempting to read the ceramic shard as a symbol for the fragmentation of the Den Brave family: both parents are dead, and while Isabel occasionally sees her brothers, there is a longstanding physical and emotional estrangement between the three siblings. However, that is not the whole truth—the Den Brave family is shattered in its own way. The significance of this broken pottery already belongs to someone else, as tends to be with most objects, most homes, most land.
Ownership is one of the novel’s major preoccupations, channeled through Isabel, who ferociously guards her family’s home and its contents. Her refuge is threatened by the arrival of Eva, who is temporarily installed in the house while Louis travels for work, and by the growing number of items that seem to disappear before her eyes. It starts with a little spoon, a small thimble. “And then,” Van der Wouden writes, “over the course of several days: an engraved cake knife, missing. A decorative tile, a letter opener. A napkin ring.”
This poeticism invokes Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “One Art,” which also carefully catalogues a list of things gone missing, starting with small objects, like keys, before ballooning into greater and greater losses: houses, places, people. Van der Wouden toys with these same sentiments. Isabel lacks a nuclear family, close friends, and love, arguably all significant losses that could be amended, but her fixation is instead displaced onto objects. She repels closeness, whether it’s rebuffing her romantically interested neighbor (who does end up proving worthwhile to avoid) or suspecting her young and friendly maid of stealing. The mania intensifies when Eva arrives and immediately resists Isabel’s cold control of domestic affairs by attempting to facilitate friendships in the household. At one point, Eva even becomes a possible culprit in the eyes of Isabel as more items go missing.
But enough loss for now. After Eva moves in with Isabel the aperture of the plot refocuses on the growing sexual tension between Isabel and Eva, whose opposing personalities provide flint for a flame that is initially exciting—testing the limits of both Isabel’s frigidity and Eva’s carefreeness—and then begins to wane for the reader. This is, in part, related to language. The inclination to render desire through overly identified sexual symbols, such as fruit, can easily amble into cliché, which is notable given Van der Wouden’s skill with words. In one particularly striking passage, she writes about the house from the vantage point of Eva and Isabel, who are sitting in the car after a night out:
“The house was a dark shape against the sky. Two proud firs. A single star came out under the waning moon; a beauty mark dotted under a coy eye. The hot season’s night rustled in the way that winter’s never did: bugs dry in the brush, things that had business in the dark.”
There is an elegant cadence to the prose, a slight twist in language to create a dynamic image of a simple nighttime scene. Two proud firs. The single star as the sky’s beauty mark. However, this literary prose, which works so well in some passages, was also occasionally at odds with the rest of the greater project.
The other component of the novel that threatens to dampen the potent, intriguing relationship between these two women is form. The novel combines the texture of a historical novel with the formulaic structures of romance and mystery genre writing, while striving for the prose style of literary fiction. The effect is like that of a broken plate, reassembled, the cracks of genre-blending occasionally showing, sometimes to the detriment of the plot, but mostly to the characters who toe the line of archetype and then yearn for a greater depth, one that the narrative cannot always accommodate.
The encounters between Eva and Isabel never seem to transcend the initial set-up of opposites repelling, until they’re intensely attracting each other. There is an opportunity to gain a greater perspective of Eva’s character in part three of the novel, after she’s left the house following a fight with Isabel, but even that knowledge does not shift the way the two women fundamentally interact with each other once they are back in the same room.
Attempts at reconciliation are sometimes left to the imagination or to ambiguity. “Isabel felt she had said it wrong, again,” Van der Wouden writes at the very end of the novel. “That she had meant the one thing and said the other thing without understanding the difference.”
For a novel that relishes language, moments that depart from specificity ring hollow, potentially a peril of shifting from genre to genre, but ambiguity is also deployed in savvy ways. At one point, Van der Wouden executes a successful and surprising twist that caused me to gasp aloud. I flipped back to the beginning, drawing connections between subtle clues that I could only find in the text after it was handed to me. It is a satisfying discovery, the novel’s greater themes aligning with the characters’ actions. And if I am being coy, it’s only because I really do not want to spoil the reveal.
The Safekeep explores pressing ethical questions about proprietorship and contends with historical accountability, while fomenting formidable passion amid people whose identities shift in unforeseen ways. There is an entire subplot about the Den Brave family’s inability to accept Hendrick’s sexuality, but that is something that never overtly comes up between Isabel and her brother even as Isabel is contending with her own relationships. I wonder what would have happened if that conversation did happen? Regardless, the ideas that undergird this novel form a strong foundation that allow the reader to enter the house Van der Wouden has so thoughtfully constructed and decide for themselves: Who really owns what?
