Study for Obedience

The unnamed narrator moves to a remote part of an unnamed northern country to become her brothers caretaker after his divorce. There are a series of unexplained and bizarre events that occur in the town shortly after her arrival, including a dog's "phantom pregnancy", a sow crushing her own piglets, a potato blight and cattle becoming demented. She soon realizes that the townspeople blame her for these events. The townspeople are reviled, often fearful of her. They are seen crossing themselves at times when interacting with her, covering their children's eyes or huddling behind counters at her very presence. The narrator explains that her and her brother belonged to "an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits."

In a negative review in The Guardian, literary critic Chris Power criticized the novel's abstract plot and lack of detail as being inadequate to portray the immigrant or the Jewish experience. He states: "The nature of her crisis, withheld like so much else, is revealed as a generational form of survivor’s guilt, but its rapid resolution, and the vagueness of her engagement with its root cause, makes for an oddly frictionless, even privileged, journey into trauma."[4] Also writing for The Guardian, Miriam Balanescu states that "The narrator's encounters with modern-day antisemitism are captured acutely and absurdly." Balanescu concluded that "This masterly follow-up to her debut acts as a meditation on survival, the dangers of absorbing the narratives of the powerful, and a warning that the self-blame of the oppressed often comes back to bite."[5] The CBC stated that the novel is "a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation."[6]