I for Isobel: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Isobel wakes up from a pleasant dream to find herself staring at a strange, ornate ceiling with a stain in one corner. As Isobel thinks circuitously of ways to describe the ceiling, she laments that the “word factory” is already at work. Isobel knows that today is going to be a bad day—last night, she was thrown out of her friend Kate’s house and forced to walk home after the two got into an argument when Isobel spaced out and acted superior while a mutual friend told a “repulsive” story. Kate told Isobel to leave, and derided her for only coming over to “see what [she could] pick up.” Isobel notes that a lot of people only go to Kate’s to pick other people up.

A man named Michael followed Isobel out of the party and asked if she wanted to come home with him—Isobel accepted, and it is his bed she’s in now. As the word factory spins, Isobel runs to the bathroom to relieve herself and wash her face. There is a bookcase in the bedroom, and Isobel crouches in front of it to look through Michael’s titles. Michael wakes up and tells Isobel that he didn’t take her for the bookish type. Suddenly embarrassed by her nakedness, Isobel reaches for a book. Michael wonders aloud to himself why “girls like [Isobel] do things like this.”

Isobel lists reasons for doing “things like this”—meaning one-night stands. She thinks of the “dubious” connection with love; the choice to do it just because one can; the desire to join the human race; and a final, deeper reason, with no words, which can only be likened to inertia. Isobel coolly tells Michael that she might have wondered why he does things like this, but she wouldn’t have asked. Isobel looks at the book she is holding—it is called Words of the Saints. After Michael accuses Isobel of disapproving of him, she decides to leave and to steal the book.

Isobel carefully places the book back on the shelf. Michael lies back and shuts his eyes; Isobel gets dressed and asks if Michael wants coffee. He tells her that there is stuff to make it in the kitchen, and she goes in to find it. While she looks for coffee in the cupboard, she hears the bathroom door shut, and the shower run; Isobel quickly runs back into the bedroom, steals the book, and leaves the house.

Isobel runs for a city-bound bus. She walks to the back and lets the new book fall open to a random page—it opens on St. John of the Cross, whom Isobel knows is “not a fun character at all.” She reads that for the soul to become enlightened and “possessed by the pure and simple light of God,” it must first be cast away. Isobel closes the book, wishing she had a soul to cast away in the first place.

Isobel gets off the bus in the center of town, grabs a coffee, and then goes to a public restroom to do her hair. She looks at her face in the mirror and hates it, as “so much of it [is] from her mother.” Isobel thinks she has “a face made for gloom.” Isobel thinks of all the words her mouth has said and all the things her eyes have seen, and she considers how deeply she loves the wide, bright world around her. Isobel is so caught up in her reverie that when she leaves the bathroom, she nearly forgets her new book. As Isobel retrieves it and leaves, she thinks about how her love of the world comes from the books she has read over the nineteen years of her life.

Isobel returns to the rooming house where’s she’s staying, and tries to buoy herself as she enters the “squalor” of her room. “Squalor within,” she thinks, “demand[s] squalor without,” and sees the word factory in her brain as evidence of her internal decay and her descent into silence and solitude. Isobel begins cleaning up her room, putting clothes into a laundry bag, wishing she had a cause to live for—still, she knows whatever it will be will have to find her first.

Isobel looks around her dingy room, thinking of how she could spruce it up. There is a loose flap of wallpaper she longs to fix, or cover up with a panel of embroidery, but remembers her sewing teacher from years ago with hatred and misery. The teacher had humiliated Isobel for her subpar work in front of the entire class, berating her for her “vulgar bad taste.” Isobel knows that her sewing teacher is, if not dead, at least very far away now, and that Isobel could take up sewing whenever she likes—this, she says, is “freedom.”

Isobel runs out to the shop and purchases all the supplies she needs for embroidery work. As she gets her materials ready, she thinks absentmindedly about the stolen book. She wonders if religion is what gave the book its alluring power over her that caused her to need to steal it—she used to think a lot about God as a child, but now realizes that she uses God more as an imaginary friend than a moral compass. Isobel decides that the book does not symbolize religion to her, but instead communication and understanding.

Isobel feels herself pulled back toward the book—she knows she must finish it. She opens it back up to Saint John of the Cross and begins reading the instructions “for entering the dark night of the senses,” and giving away one’s soul. The first rule is to “do those things which bring thee into contempt, and desire that others may do them.” Isobel believes she does that quite all right. The second is to “speak disparagingly of thyself.” Isobel notes that she does that plenty. The third is to “think humbly and contemptuously of thyself.” Isobel thinks that these rules are a perfect picture of “Isobel the nuisance.” She laughs at the fact that she is on her way to heaven, and didn’t even know it.

Isobel traces a pattern for her embroidery. She knows that tomorrow she must go home to the suburb she grew up in, and retrace her steps so as to find a memory that will give her a clue as to why the book holds such sway over her. She recalls a memory of being bullied by a girl in her class who barred the lavatory door to Isobel for so long that she peed her pants, and then had to waddle home soiled. Isobel looks back on this sad memory of herself with a “new tolerance”—she realizes she could be either the waddler or the bully, as one has “so little choice” in what one does as a child.

The next day, after lunch, Isobel gets ready to return to her hometown. It is only two miles away, but she feels that though it is a “short journey in space, it [is] a long one in time.” She left less than a year ago, but still feels like her childhood suburb belongs to “earlier days” entirely. As Isobel boards the bus that will take her home, she thinks that though she is mortal, she must live as if she were immortal—otherwise, she wonders, what’s the point?

Isobel gets off the bus at the main street of her home suburb. She is amazed by the quiet all around her. As she grows anxious, the word factory in her head starts up, but she clutches her book and feels protected. As she passes the church, she feels guilty for having skulked around the church without going in so often as a child, for fear of being seen and reported to her mother. Now, Isobel goes inside, and feels a sense of “shadowy peace,” though above the confessional, she senses “guilt and unease” hovering. Things are different than she remembers them—the church is bigger than in her memory but the pulpit smaller.

Isobel is assaulted by a memory of an arithmetic test in school. She got every question right, and so was allowed to sit while the rest of her classmates were forced to stand up against the wall and answer questions, and were beaten by the nuns when they were wrong. After class, an angry pack of classmates chased Isobel through the schoolyard, but when the leader of them finally caught up to her, he didn’t do anything to her—he just ran away back into the crowd. Isobel considers how “in a true memory,” one doesn’t see oneself clearly—all of the “miserable self-images” are simply invention.

Isobel walks out of the church and experiences another memory—the moment she received her state of grace, unexpectedly, and struggled so hard to keep in it for a few weeks. She remembers struggling to understand the “rules” of a state of grace, reading obsessively about the saints and trying to discover the secret of grace itself. She doesn’t recall reading the book she has now in her childhood, but concedes that she might have—at the very least, coming into possession of a book with the word “Saints” on the cover was “enough to bring back the calm of the season” of her childhood state of grace. 

Isobel is mildly disappointed that religious was, after all, the meaning behind her connection to the book. She continues wandering her hometown, walking the route from school to home. She thinks she should go by her house and “lay a ghost or two” down. As she approaches her house, she hears a voice calling her name. Her first instinct is to run—she remembers her mother telling her to run, as she had “put a lady’s name in the paper,” and that lady was going to have her put in jail. It is too late, though—Isobel is caught. She sees her old neighbor, Mrs. Adams, coming towards her and smiling brightly. Isobel is shocked.

Mrs. Adams asks Isobel what she’s doing with herself, and Isobel answers that she’s working at an importer’s office. Mrs. Adams invites Isobel in for a cup of tea—Isobel remembers the old fear that Mrs. Adams would call the police on her before realizing “what rubbish” that fear is. As Isobel follows Mrs. Adams into her home, she laments the “years of misery” her mother and father caused her.

Mrs. Adams brings tea and biscuits to the table, and tells Isobel she has something she wants to show her. She leaves the room and returns with a photo album. She opens it to a picture of a newspaper cutting, and asks Isobel if she remembers it. Isobel reads the cutting—it is a poem Isobel wrote about Mrs. Adams and her cat Smoke when she was nine years old. Isobel recalls Mrs. Prendergast’s story of the baby in the baking dish.

Mrs. Adams tells Isobel that the poem “thrilled” her—she loved the cat very much, and when the poem was published in the newspaper, she delighted that Smoke was famous. The cat has since died, Mrs. Adams says, but when she wants to remember him, she looks at Isobel’s poem. She tells Isobel that when the poem was published she was so happy that she bought Isobel a small book to paste her poems into, but that whenever she called Isobel in the street to come inside and get her present, Isobel ran away. Mrs. Adams adds that she tried to give the book to Mrs. Callaghan, who said that it would only encourage Isobel to “waste time” instead of completing her schoolwork.

Isobel realizes that her parents never wanted a writer in the house—they never wanted anyone who could record what went on there or allow other people to bear witness to it. Isobel says meekly that she had always thought Mrs. Adams was angry because Isobel put her name in the paper. Mrs. Adams asks Isobel whatever would have made her think that, and then, realizing that the answer is her mother, Mrs. Adams states that Mrs. Callaghan was “a strange woman.” Mrs. Adams tells Isobel sadly that she doesn’t have the book anymore—she gave it to her niece.

Isobel finishes her tea and thanks Mrs. Adams—she knows she has to leave soon, as she feels she is “coming to pieces in great slabs.” As Mrs. Adams ushers Isobel into the street, she feels “artesian tears rising from the center of the earth.” She hurries down the street, cursing her parents in her mind and out loud as “spiteful tormenting bastards.” She realizes that her father was in many ways just as bad as her mother, as he helped to instill the myth about Mrs. Adams in her. Isobel sobs as she makes her way down the road, and her tears drown out all thoughts except for one: “I am a writer.”

Isobel worries that it is too late for her to pursue her dream, but as the crying lets up, she realizes that she can choose to be a writer if she wants to be—she can choose anything in the world. She decides to give into the word factory at last, and wonders if it has, all along, been the poor baby trying to get out of the baking dish. Isobel, feeling much better, continues heading through the street, towards a shop where she can buy an notebook. In the shop, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror—she is “wild-haired, blubbered, [and] red-eyed.” Isobel thinks that this moment is the happiest of her life.

After purchasing the book, Isobel heads home. Back in her room, she opens up the notebook and begins writing a story called “The Book is Gone”—it is from Michael’s perspective, as he talks with a friend about the girl who stole his book early in the morning after a one-night stand. As she writes, she realizes she must send the book back to Michael—she can live without it, and has her own words now to carry as a talisman instead.

The next morning at work, Isobel’s friends ask her how her weekend was. Unable to tell them all she has been through in just a few days, she simply says it was “very nice,” and smiles so happily that Rita wonders aloud if Isobel has met someone. Isobel uncovers her typewriter and smiles at it. “Oh, yes,” she thinks to herself, “I met someone.”