“It is only after the rape that my character truly disappears, but I would argue that she is a cypher to begin with because she lacks an interior life. She is described minutely from the outside only. After the rape, her vanishing is complete. It hulls her out as a character and leaves her empty.”

“You have to recognise the performance in that!” Prof. September reaches forward to tug at my sleeve. “He is enacting the ways in which rape can erase the personhood of the survivor.”

“For that to be true, there has to be some layer of awareness in the text—some nod to the reader, however subtle, that this is what the author is doing. Otherwise it simply is what it is—an erasure. And what’s more . . .” My voice is getting louder and faster. I can hear it in my head. The gabbling of the unhinged. “All that stuff about Lucy not wanting to prosecute the rapists because she recognises the validity of their anger. She takes upon her body the sins of apartheid like some dungaree-wearing lamb of God. What utter, utter garbage.”

“It’s symbolic! It’s a metaphor!”

“It’s an insult.”

“White women were complicit in apartheid, Lucy. You know that. And they continue to benefit from white privilege and institutionalised racism. Fictional Lucy chooses to make reparations by not identifying her rapists to the police and by continuing to maintain a cordial relationship with them.”

“That just replaces one form of oppression with another. Patriarchy for racism. An eye for an eye. There aren’t hierarchies of oppression. Patriarchy isn’t better or worse than racism. By tolerating the misogynistic invasion of her body, Lucy isn’t striking a blow for freedom. She is exchanging one jail cell for another.”

Prof. September inhales deeply. She waits until the flush fades from her cheeks and the lines on her forehead smooth out.

“Lucy.” She smiles at me. “The book is brilliant precisely because it stimulates such heated debate. I’m sure you can see that. No other book in recent times has been so fiercely discussed and disputed. It is a veritable conversation piece, as all the best novels are. I wouldn’t give two cents for a book that generates no disagreement at all, would you?”

“This isn’t a matter of opinion. It’s not up for discussion. To paint a woman as admirable for acquiescing after the fact to her own rape is severely problematic.”

She winces. “Such an American term—problematic. It is so overused as to be virtually meaningless.”