By Drew Lavigne, Frye Correspondent
Property by Kate Cayley is a modern Mrs. Dalloway, written in a shimmering stream of consciousness style. The novel which takes place over a single day, follows Nat and her partner Frankie, their children Clio and Felix, and their neighbours Maddy and Alex, along with their children Sylvie and Milo, as Nat prepares to host a dinner party later that evening. Around them circulates a wider community, each life briefly illuminated. The narrative moves fluidly between interior perspectives, voices flowing into and colliding with one another in subtle, sometimes ironic ways. By the end of the day someone is dead.
The book begins with a vivid description of rats and water in the basement of an excavated house, “The rats have lived here as long as the house. Before the house” (9). The basement of a house under construction becomes a symbol for death and deep time, suggesting that human life, with its clotted emotional complexities, eventually returns to the muddy underground where other beings are prioritized. In sharp contrast to the reoccurring rat-infested underworld are the human characters living a single day of their lives above ground, in the dignity and beauty of the light. The narrative of Property is as much about water moving and light changing through a single day as it is about the complex interior lives of its characters.
I had a wonderful professor who taught me how to read Virginia Woolf and in one of her lectures on Mrs. Dalloway, she suggested that the secret to understanding the text was to let it wash over you like water. “Don’t fixate on meaning; let the novel move through you in impressions,” she had said. Property invites this kind of reading: a book of water moving and light progressing through a single day, but also through the consciousness of the reader. It reads like water washing over you.
Though the novel continually returns to Nat and her concerns for her family, the thematic focus lies elsewhere. Ilya, a construction worker repairing a water-damaged basement, becomes the center of the novel’s examination of class. His presence in the middle-class neighbourhood provokes fascination and suspicion, particularly among the women, whose anxieties begin to attach themselves to him. He is less a person to them than a surface for projection. Nat thinks, “He probably believed in the reptilian conspiracy, the deep state, was barely aware he didn’t live in America” (24). She stops herself but returns to variations of this fear.
Contemporary paranoias, especially those shaped by online discourse, seep into the minds of the characters. Much of the novel’s tension emerges from a subtle but persistent gender divide: female anxiety and the possibility of male violence. However, the novel inverts this familiar obsession. The men are thoughtful, inward, and often misjudged. Ilya is a sensitive and nearly invisible figure, so much so that the other characters fail to learn his name until the novel’s end. Reflecting on the countless labourers before him who built and maintained these homes, Ilya thinks, “No one knew the names of those men. There was no way to know their names, they were visible only in the hammer marks, the square beaten nails” (29).
This concern with vanishing becomes the novel’s most haunting motif. The homes are built upon layers of forgotten labour, as well as on unstable ground: water, tunnels, and rot. Even though it is a middle-class neighbourhood, Ilya thinks, “These houses were shit, lopsided, built on sand” (33). The symbolic structure reinforces this unease. The houses, threatened by flooding and undercut by rat tunnels, become emblems of a fragile social order and subterranean dread.
Property is deeply attentive to the subtle ironies of its characters. Cayley is interested in the quiet absurdities and moral evasions of privileged lives, as well as the ways expectations can be undermined. The novel moves with a sense of inevitability yet retains the capacity to surprise, to pull the rug out in small, ironic gestures. Nat, for instance, prides herself on her progressive values, yet proves judgmental when confronted with those outside her class.
One of the novel’s most affecting moments comes during Nat’s private recollection of Maddy’s unexpected power as an actress. This moment gestures toward the type of recognition all the characters struggle to attain. Each person longs to be understood, and to understand.
While Maddy plays a secret game where she observes people in public and tries to emulate them (a way to engage with her passion for acting) the narrator states, “Nat read everything and had opinions on everything. Maddy was tired of opinions. She just wanted to look at faces” (46). In a novel full of projections and anxieties, this passage cuts to the truth of our current moment: that under our oversimplified projections lies beauty, complexity, and inherent dignity. That everyone is deeply interesting.
This is very much a poet’s novel, rich in detail, emotional precision, and symbolism. In many ways, Property is a companion book to Cayley’s 2023 poetry collection Lent, where many of the same images and themes are explored. There is even a poem in that collection titled “Of Rats and Floods.” The same close attention to detail that feels like praise or prayer is present in both books.
By compressing its action into a single day, Cayley allows the narrative to extend both backward into history and forward into imagined futures. Each moment feels saturated with more than itself, suggesting the weight of lives not fully seen or understood. Just as water moves where it must and light falls where it will, so too do the lives of the characters. They move through their day with the inevitability of destiny. It is fascinating to reflect on the spiritual dimension of this narrative structure.
In her essay “On style,” Susan Sontag writes, “In art ‘Content’ is, as it were, the pretext, the goal, the lure which engages consciousness in essentially formal processes of transformation.” Property achieves something great by transforming an examination of class into a powerful aesthetic object.
—Drew Lavigne
To cite this article:
Drew Lavigne
Drew Lavigne is the anglophone Poet Laureate of Moncton, New Brunswick. A member of the editorial board at The Fiddlehead and host of the Attic Owl reading series. Recent work has appeared in Valium, Visual Arts News, Tourniquet Magazine, and with Éditions Rhizome. He translated the collection Poems Twofold with Georgette LeBlanc and is the author of Evening Dress with Anstruther Press.
Kate Cayley
