When Visiting Hours Are Over: a Review of Kat Meads's While Visiting Babette By Carrie Callahan

While Visiting Babette, the new novel by Kat Meads published by Sagging Meniscus Press, is a novel of strange episodes that take place in an evolving but nameless institution. Ina, trapped there against her will, must navigate a new way of existing in a rote environment along with non-rote characters.

Kat Meads has published six novels, three essay collections, two short fiction collections, an epistolary memoir, a novelette and a hybrid fiction. She’s also had multiple short plays produced in New York and Los Angelesand had her work published inMiracle Monocle Issue 22. To say Meads is an experienced author only scratches the surface of her broad career. So it’s no wonder that her latest novel shows a controlled hand and a deliberate, careful layering of story.

The cast of characters in While Visiting Babette would be rendered cartoonish if not for Meads’s deft hand at sketching them. There is the confident, comfortable, seemingly all-knowing, and bold Babette. Accompanying her is Ina, our point of view character. While the only explicit reason we’re given for Ina’s institutionalization is her “rookie mistake,” there are hints in the narrative that her incarceration may have to do with her grief at the loss of her Aunt Careen and a potential eating disorder (something only clearer later, when Ina seems to “inexplicably” be shrinking out of her clothes and Babette tells here, “You can’t not eat.”).

Along with Ina and Babette, we have a cast of chaotic characters, but none stand out quite like the creative and insightful Clara. Clara, like Meads, writes in multiple genres. This cross-genre creativity seems like more than a coincidence, and Clara seems to act as a stand-in for Meads herself. The story is also littered with various nameless and faceless employees of the facility who, while they remain largely invisible, maintain the boundaries of Ina’s life there.

One other character exists mainly off-page: Aunt Careen. It’s implied—though never stated outright—that Aunt Careen is no longer in the picture. I took this to mean that she had passed away, and it was this second-orphaning that left Ina and Babette susceptible to the institutionalization that they ultimately endure.

The unchanging nature of the surroundings and the monotony of routine molds the narrative into an episodic shape, almost as if we’re reading Ina’s bullet journal. The first incident in While Visiting Babette is Ina being wordlessly locked in with Babette after visiting without a visitor’s pass. As Ina is forced to live in the “facility,” as it’s called, she has a myriad of encounters with the other inmates in an almost-dreamlike series of interludes. The purgatory of the facility allows her ample time with her cousin and her thoughts, and we learn there may be things lurking in Ina’s mind and history that only come to light through careful reading.

From the outset, Ina and Babette are joined at the hip, and Babette even reads Ina’s mind. At first, I thought that Ina and Babette might have been one person, but such a twist never manifested. Additionally, evidence to the contrary built up as Clara addresses them individually.

The prose itself was straightforward in a way that reflects institutionalization itself—a soft surrealism in a hazy calm without distracting flourishes. When we learn of the ducks, for instance, we get their behavior without much of the expected turns of phrase regarding incandescent feathers or what have you; we just have the ducks and what the ducks mean to Ina. The prose is circumscribed in the way Ian’s world is circumscribed, drawing the reader into the same sense of calm claustrophobia. It’s easy to relate with the characters when the somatic experience of reading seems to match their existence on the page.

I did note that Ina’s point of view seemed to skew younger. At one point it is established that she was older than 15, but her behavior and perspective seems to be that of a child closer to twelve or thirteen to me. This could have been an intentional infantilization due to the grade-school-like structure of days at the facility. That the other inmates share drawings and put on plays further reinforces a juvenility of it all, but that may just reflect the divorce from the responsibilities of everyday life that institutionalization represents.

I think it would be difficult not to consider the pandemic as well when reading this novel. The entrapment within narrow confines, with the same limited cast of people seems akin to the experience of the pandemic lockdowns. However, I think considering this a work of pandemic fiction alone could distract from the larger meaning it builds. For me, reading the tale of a woman infantilized and circumscribed where once her freedoms were taken easily highlights the backslide in the political momentum of gender equality—not that Meads makes this explicit. Like much of the vital heart of this story, the most important elements seem to shimmer just off the page, willing us to find them with a carefully averted gaze.

Overall, the narrative in While Visiting Babette was tight and interesting with little in the way of wasted space. A close reader would be rewarded in this text, as much of the interest lies just between the lines, just out of sight, where Ina refuses to look.