What Kingdom’s tension between truth and fiction is best summarized in a simple line: “I sometimes wake up and realize that what’s going to happen has no name.” This hazy prose lets slip both the unreliability of the speaker and the unknowability of her experience. As Elaine Scarry argued in The Body in Pain, “ . . . pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” In this regard, the art of fiction seeks to intimate those private, personal, and often unnamable experiences implicit in a life of mental illness and institutionalization. In What Kingdom, Gråbøl’s fiction aches to show the reader such experiences, to bear witness to the lives of those living in “captivity,” as the text describes it.
In the press release provided by the publisher, Archipelago Books, What Kingdom is described as focusing “on the unusual intimacy between care workers and patients, and between the patients themselves.” This collective experience echoes from the perspectives of a handful of characters, across psychiatric hospitals and into prisons, making this a polyphonic work. While there is only one speaker, she is constantly in dialogue with other characters and contexts, stopping intermittently to reflect on her own experiences. The result of this is a rhizomatic novel that attempts to make connections between people, places, and experiences.
As the novel begins, we are introduced to some of the other characters—Waheed, Sara, Lasse, Hector, and Marie—based on how well the narrator can hear them. Waheed is the loudest, while the others—all residents aged between eighteen and thirty—are largely silent. In this section, titled “Sweet Corridor Law,” Gråbøl describes her existential condition as one in which “You hear no voices, no electric dialogues from any TV, no solid footsteps sounding on the floor.” Sound, it appears, allows for Gråbøl’s speaker to take in the world around her in a way that is both phenomenological as well as political. By listening to those around her, she not only reflects on the lived conditions of her own experience but shares in a collective political experience, one that, according to §107 of the Danish Social Service Act, designates her and all of those on her floor under the state’s temporary care, accommodations, and responsibility.
As the novel evolves, we see that Gråbøl’s speaker views her individual experience as reflective of the Danish state’s attitudes and policies around mental health care. For example, Gråbøl acknowledges the rhetorical weight of psychiatric diagnoses and the impact they have on one’s status in Danish society as well as on one’s sense of self: “If you’ve had more than one depression, you’re diagnosed as having depressive tendencies, which in principle is a chronic disorder. But for various reasons it still matters what kind of diagnosis you’re given during your course of treatment,” she writes. This tension between the public and the private, the social and the individual, and the political and the personal undergirds the work as a whole, but passages like these offer rare glimpses into the relationship between public status and private identity. This dynamic between self-signified identity positions and socially constructed public positions matters because within the context of mental healthcare and institutionalization, these positions deal specifically with the way one thinks or acts and the ways in which they are treated.
The magic of Gråbøl’s work comes from its ability to bridge the divide between micro and macro, or, in this case, the personal and institutional. The passages in which her speaker describes the weight of a care worker on her back as she fights to escape his grip are equally as haunting as passages in which she describes the bureaucracy, institutional jargon, and dehumanization implicit in the system of psychiatric care:
Certain diagnoses will trigger the top-rate benefit; it’s considered that certain mental illnesses are harder to manage than others when it comes to a person’s capacity to hold down a job. This is the case with disorders such as schizophrenia or schizotypal personality disorder, borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, perhaps more, I can’t remember. But if you’ve got an eating disorder, you only get the standard benefit.
While such passages might seem to be political statements, What Kingdom stops short of considering mental illness a social construct, an idea most famously posited by psychiatrists like Thomas Szasz. A psychiatrist himself, Szasz likened psychiatry to “alchemy” and inspired a movement of advocates who argued against the prescriptive and othering nature of diagnostic practice. But Szasz has recently undergone renewed criticism, not only from mental health professionals but also from people living with neurodivergences, some of whom recognize important political and social cause for naming and owning their diagnoses.
This need is recognizable in Gråbøl’s passages in which she bluntly describes the daily occurrences of life as a psychiatric patient, and the lack of agency, dominion, and control:
We increase our medications, decrease our medications, discontinue our medications, and start all over again… We participate in group therapy, in cognitive therapy, in psychotherapy, in dialectic behavioral therapy; we go for a psychoeducation appointment and suffer an anxiety attack on the sidewalk outside; we have no other option but trust…
This facet, “no other option but trust,” represents the tension implicit throughout Gråbøl’s novel, namely that her work is more creative than polemical. Its power comes not from its argumentation, but instead from its testimony. The novel is an imperfect representation of a complicated emotional state, one often influenced by political context as well as the subjectivity of perception and the flaws of memory. Teetering on this precipice of truth and fiction makes What Kingdom uniquely successful.
Gråbøl’s speaker is simultaneously restless and contemplative, both experiencing the emotional and phenomenological realities associated with life in a psychiatric hospital as well as examining her own political position. For example, Gråbøl’s speaker describes the complexity of running into a fellow former patient, who she calls a “ghost,” in public after they have been discharged. In describing herself as “transparent” and “surprised,” she reminds readers that “you wonder if those hospital years were real or if it was just something you made up.” By putting the speaker in dialogue with herself and society, What Kingdom interrogates the recursive relationship between public and private life. The speaker describes this further when she feels “as if there’s no one in the queue who doesn’t immediately see two ghosts in all their shimmering transparency, their theatrical representations of a person doing their shopping.” The nexus of these two points, the brackish water between public life in the Danish psychiatric care system and the private experience of a neurodivergent speaker, represents the primary tension of the text.
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of Gråbøl’s narrative, especially for American readers, is its critique of the Danish system of psychiatric care. While Americans are often quick to celebrate a wide body of evidence for “Nordic exceptionalism,” scholars, activists, and writers have recently taken to criticizing some of the institutional norms within these countries. Gråbøl asks us to look deeper and consider what it means to be institutionalized. In the second portion of the novel, “Containment,” Gråbøl writes:
It seems significant, in more ways than one, that the psychiatric care worker’s clothes aren’t the hospital’s; no white coat, no medication-blue trousers, just a normal outfit, a normal uniform. But still, you’re never in doubt as to who’s the care worker and who’s the patient, even if the clothes are no giveaway.
In this passage, Gråbøl recognizes the familiarity and comfort that comes from a care worker in plain clothes. This stands in contrast to the othering nature of medical garb frequently worn within such facilities. When the narrator celebrates that “Mark’s uniform is hoodie and shorts,” she identifies something familiar, something she does not recognize as a threat. But such recognition is short-lived, as she marvels, “It’s amazing how much stuff he can carry around in those pockets. Syringes, keys, pills, alarms,” all tools, instruments, and symbols of power.
Moments like these reveal the verisimilar aspects of Gråbøl’s work, the likeness to the truth, if not the truth itself. This uneasy relationship between what actually happens in these spaces and the ways in which we remember or perceive them says much about trauma responses. At a time in which trauma has been described as “America’s favorite diagnosis,” fictive works like Gråbøl’s shed important, if mimetic, light on this issue—especially given that the work functions largely as a global narrative, set in Copenhagen but in constant dialogue with American artists, films, and culture, such as Michael Jackson and the Game as well as movies like The Lord of the Rings and—importantly—Girl, Interrupted, from which the novel takes its name.
The end of the novel is most explicitly activist, when the narrator describes the invisibility of mental disorders. Looking out from a balcony, Gråbøl’s speaker stands beside her cadre of residents and questions, “What makes you perceive mental illness as something invisible?” She asks, “Is the effect of depression on your bones and jones invisible? Is persistent physical exhaustion invisible?”
Despite shifting attitudes about mental health and the proliferation of neurodivergence in popular dialogue, it is still rare to find meaningful representations of contemporary psychiatric healthcare, especially in fiction. What Kingdom is most certainly an exception. This is a meaningful work, masterfully told by a promising writer. While literary fiction from the Nordic countries has been largely represented by Norwegian autofiction, Fine Gråbøl and What Kingdom represent a simultaneous homage to and departure from those works, one that itself promises to usher in fiction that may tell deeper truths about both society and ourselves.
