Ever lived in an apartment where the walls were a bit too thin and you often overheard music from the next apartment?  Did you ever wonder who was listening to that music and why?  What did the music do for them?  How did it make them feel?  What were they doing while listening to it?  Did you ever overhear too much of a conversation?  Or maybe you just heard bits and pieces and you were left to fill in the missing pieces?

Did you ever overhear an argument that sounded detrimental to someone, and yet your curious mind just listened instead of turning up the television?  You didn’t do anything to stop it.  Did you ever wonder if someone was on the other side listening to you?  While the majority of my questions suggest you could somehow judge Cheryl Anne Gardner’s book, The Thin Wall, by its title, if you did you’d be wrong.

At 124 pages, Gardner embraces the novella format, a particular type of book I have to admit I haven’t read in a while.  And in her book, the reader is treated to those brief scenarios, those un-muffled pieces of conversation you could hear through the wall once you turned off your television.  I was constantly eager to turn the page to find out what would happen next, only to find the characters in a new setting and having new conversations on a different day without any of the “in between” movements that often push a longer novel along.  Gardner has whittled the story down to its bare essence and given you, quite purely, only what you need to know.

The story revolves around five friends and the relationships that mingle between them, and Gardner does not just scratch the surface of their friendships. She tunnels through the very veins of each of these characters, carefully dissecting the differences that lie between their hearts and their souls.  Laleana O-Reilly, a librarian slightly obsessed with the Marquis de Sade, finds herself torn between two very different men.  To make things worse, the two men are close friends within the group of five.  Julian,  the dominant one of the bunch, visits Laleana’s bed with maddening “monsteresque” fury.  The two explore the brutal realms that lie between pleasure and pain.  But their blood-laced habits soon run Laleana spiritually dry, and she finds herself bored with Julian’s lust as her heart desires something much much more.

The “something more” is a shy introvert named Ioan.  He’s quiet.  He’s an artist.  And he spends his nights burning his paintings of nude women because he just “can’t get the blood right.”  Might I add that several of these paintings are portraits Laleana herself has posed for.  Between posing for Ioan, having afternoon tea with her girlfriend Cecile, and hanging out in the projection booth of  a porn theater with an addict named Tom, Laleana ignores their warnings about Julian as they spy the healing cuts on her back.  But an awkward and intense moment shared with Ioan one night will soon change everything.

Brimming with passion and sexual tension, their story lines often reveal more to the reader than what is written right on the page in front of you.  Laleana’s love for literature and her own writing habits give the book a certain depth outside of the submission and dominance her and her friends explore.  The book even ends with a short story written by Laleana entitled “The Muse and the Alchemist.”

By blatantly presenting her characters with such honesty, Gardner commands her readers to question their own inner identity, as presented in these lines from the last chapter:

A person is defined by what they do and what they don’t do. It really is that simple.

Our lives belong to us and no one else.

Were we better people for the self-imposed trials and tribulations we had endured? Had we gained anything appreciable from the choices we had made, the blood we had shed, the secrets we had chosen to reveal, or the shadows we had confronted in blind faith?  We would all like to think so.

True salvation lies in this knowledge.  It lies in the cruelly eroded crevices of a cold thin wall.

Cheryl Anne Gardner tears those walls down!  She has given us a brilliant character study focusing on where the lines between sex and friendship blur.  It’s a place you don’t want to go to, a conversation you don’t want to overhear, but curiosity will have its way with you.  And when it does, The Thin Wall is the book you should treat yourself to.

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