“The trouble is coming from inside; from his family. And unless something happens to stop it, it will keep billowing out, worse and worse”. Another gr“The trouble is coming from inside; from his family. And unless something happens to stop it, it will keep billowing out, worse and worse”. Another great Irish novel I nearly missed out on, despite it being shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Writers’ Prize and winning the inaugural Nero Book Awards’ Gold Prize, this one because I was daunted by its doorstopper proportions. I’d gotten it in mind that it was all about money: Dickie Barnes’s car dealership is foundering and the straitened circumstances affect his whole family (wife Imelda, teenage daughter Cass, adolescent son PJ). A belated post-financial crash novel? Again, it sounded tired, maybe clichéd.
But actually, this turned out to be just the kind of wry, multi-perspective dysfunctional family novel that I love, such that I was mostly willing to excuse a baggy midsection. Murray opens with long sections of close third person focusing on each member of the Barnes family in turn. Cass is obsessed with sad-girl poetry and her best friend Elaine, but self-destructive habits threaten her university career before it’s begun. PJ is better at making friends through online gaming than in real life because of his family’s plunging reputation, so concocts a plan to run away to Dublin. Imelda is flirting with Big Mike, who’s taking over the dealership, but holds out hope that Dickie’s wealthy father will bail them out. Dickie, under the influence of a weird handyman named Victor, has become fixated on eradicating grey squirrels and building a bunker to keep his family safe.
There are no speech marks throughout, and virtually no punctuation in Imelda’s sections. There are otherwise no clever tricks to distinguish the points-of-view, though. The voice is consistent. Murray doesn’t have to strain to sound like a teenage girl; he fully and convincingly inhabits each character (even some additional ones towards the end). I particularly liked the final “Age of Loneliness” section, which starts rotating between the perspectives more quickly, each one now in the second person. It all builds towards a truly thrilling yet inconclusive ending. I could imagine this as a TV miniseries for sure.
It was all the details I didn’t pick up from my pre-reading about The Bee Sting that made it so intricate and rewarding: (view spoiler)[Imelda’s awful upbringing in macho poverty and how it seemed that Rose, then Frank, might save her. The cruelty of Frank’s accidental death and the way that, for both Imelda and Dickie, being together seemed like the only way of getting over him, even if Imelda was marrying the ‘wrong’ brother. The recurrence of same-sex attraction for Dickie, then Cass. The irony of the bee sting that never was (hide spoiler)].
BUT. Yes, it’s too long, particularly Imelda’s central section. I had to start skimming to have any hope of making it through. Trim the whole thing by 200 pages and then we’re really talking. But I will certainly read Murray again, and most likely will revisit this book in the future to give it the attention it deserves.
The first few pages seemed medieval; the next two 19th-century; the next several hyper-contemporary. Always, the vocabulary felt arcane and overblown.The first few pages seemed medieval; the next two 19th-century; the next several hyper-contemporary. Always, the vocabulary felt arcane and overblown. Feeling this was going to be one of those annoyingly vague fables of strangers and peculiar happenings, I gave up after the first 10 pages....more
(3.5) A starred Kirkus review first put this on my radar, and I requested a copy back in February. Though I enjoyed the first two stories, I then set (3.5) A starred Kirkus review first put this on my radar, and I requested a copy back in February. Though I enjoyed the first two stories, I then set the book aside. Its longlisting for this year’s Booker Prize reminded me to pick it back up and it’s now one of the six on the shortlist.
Five of eight stories are filtered through the consciousness of Trelawny, the younger son of Topper and Sanya, who immigrated to Miami in the late 1970s to escape unrest in Kingston, Jamaica. Older brother Delano is the golden boy, yet in a post-recession landscape both sons struggle to get by. After their parents’ split, the family home seems like a totem of security.
An accident leads Delano to give up his tree service business and pursue reggae music professionally. Trees play a pivotal role: when Topper humiliates him at a party by calling him “soft” and “defective,” Trelawny attacks his father’s beloved ackee tree with an axe. After Topper kicks him out, Trelawny lives in his car, accepting a succession of strange and sordid gigs (the stuff of “Odd Jobs” and the title story; “in Miami … you’re as likely to wind up getting your organs harvested as you are to make a profit”) before settling on teaching.
Three stories are in the always engaging second person (one of those inhabiting Topper’s perspective), three are narrated in the first person by Trelawny, and two are in the third person – the one about Delano and another about their cousin Cukie (“Splashdown”). Family legacy, particularly from fathers, is a major theme. “I felt sick with hatred,” Trelawny says. “For her [racist] father, yes, but for all fathers, for their propensity for passing down the worst of themselves.”
Trelawny is an entertaining POV character, jaded but quick-witted as he navigates microaggressions. People are confused about whether he’s African American or Latino. “In Flux,” the opening story and probably the strongest, has him coming to terms with what it means to be Black in America while living in Florida or at college in the Midwest, prompted by a question he frequently has to field: “What are you?” My other favourite story was “Independent Living,” in which he’s an administrator for an oversubscribed senior housing block and has to become as wily as his residents.
Escoffery creates a strong sense of place and character. I suspect there’s a lot that’s autobiographical here, as is common in first books. His ambivalence about sites that hold personal significance is palpable. Ideally, a linked collection will be composed of confident stand-alone stories that together are more than the sum of their parts. I didn’t really feel that about these. While the voice is promising and several stories are highlights, the whole didn’t set me on fire. (And I’d be astonished if it won the Booker. That’ll go to a guy named Paul.) Maybe Escoffery has a great novel brewing, though.
A favourite passage:
“On the day you are scheduled to begin the sixth grade, a hurricane named Andrew pops your house’s roof open, peeling it back like the lid of a Campbell’s soup can, pouring a fraction of the Atlantic into your bedroom, living room—everywhere—bloating carpet, drywall, and fibreboard with sopping sea salt corrosion. It disinters the kidney-colored fibreglass from the walls and ceiling, splaying the house’s entrails on the lawn. The storm chops your neighbor’s house to rubble, parks a tugboat at the far end of your street.”
This was the Mexican author’s fourth novel; she’s also a magazine director and has published several short story collections. I’d liken it to a cross This was the Mexican author’s fourth novel; she’s also a magazine director and has published several short story collections. I’d liken it to a cross between Motherhood by Sheila Heti and (the second half of) No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. Thirtysomething friends Laura and Alina veer off in different directions, yet end up finding themselves in similar ethical dilemmas. Laura, who narrates, is adamant that she doesn’t want children, and follows through with sterilization. However, when she becomes enmeshed in a situation with her neighbours – Doris, who’s been left by her abusive husband, and her troubled son Nicolás – she understands some of the emotional burden of motherhood. Even the pigeon nest she watches on her balcony presents a sort of morality play about parenthood.
Meanwhile, Alina and her partner Aurelio embark on infertility treatment. Laura fears losing her friend: “Alina was about to disappear and join the sect of mothers, those creatures with no life of their own who, zombie-like, with huge bags under their eyes, lugged prams around the streets of the city.” They eventually have a daughter, Inés, but learn before her birth that brain defects may cause her to die in infancy or be severely disabled. Right from the start, Alina is conflicted. Will she cling to Inés no matter her condition, or let her go? And with various unhealthy coping mechanisms to hand, will her relationship with Aurelio stay the course?
Laura alternates between her life and her friends’ circumstances, taking on an omniscient voice on Nettel’s behalf – she recounts details she couldn’t possibly be privy to, at least not at the time (there’s a similar strategy in The Group by Lara Feigel). The question of what is fated versus what is chosen, also represented by Laura’s interest in tarot and palm-reading, always appeals to me. This was a wry and sharp commentary on women’s options.
(3.5) My fourth from Fitzgerald. One of her later novels, this was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Its pre-war Moscow setting seemed to take on extr(3.5) My fourth from Fitzgerald. One of her later novels, this was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Its pre-war Moscow setting seemed to take on extra significance as I read it during the early weeks of the Russian occupation of Ukraine. Its title is both literal, referring to the March days in 1913 when “there was the smell of green grass and leaves, inconceivable for the last five months” and the expatriate Reid family can go to their dacha once again, and metaphorical. For what seems to printer Frank Reid – whose wife Nellie has taken a train back to England and left him to raise their three children alone – like an ending may actually presage new possibilities when his accountant, Selwyn, hires a new nanny for the children.
I have previously found Fitzgerald’s work slight, subtle to the point of sailing over my consciousness without leaving a ripple. While her characters and scenes still underwhelm – I always want to go deeper – I liked this better than the others I’ve read (The Bookshop, Offshore, and The Blue Flower), perhaps simply because it’s not a novella so is that little bit more expansive. And though she’s not an author you’d turn to for plot, more does actually happen here, including a gunshot. Frank is a genial Everyman, fond of Russia yet exasperated with its bureaucracy and corruption – this “magnificent and ramshackle country.” He knows how things work and isn’t above giving a bribe when it’s expedient for his business:
He took an envelope out of his drawer, and, conscious of taking only a mild risk, since the whole unwieldy administration of All the Russias, which kept working, even if only just, depended on the passing of countless numbers of such envelopes, he slid it across the top of the desk. The inspector opened it without embarrassment, counted out the three hundred roubles it contained and transferred them to a leather container, half way between a wallet and a purse, which he kept for ‘innocent income’.
I particularly liked Uncle Charlie’s visit, the glimpses of Orthodox Easter rituals, and a strangely mystical moment of communion with some birch trees. A part of me did wonder if the setting was neither here nor there, if a few plastered-on descriptions of Moscow were truly enough to constitute convincing historical fiction. That’s a question for those more familiar with Russia and its literature to answer, but I enjoyed the seasonal awakening.
A reread. In 2021, I rated 3.5*, calling this a predictable narrative and the evil nuns a stereotype. This time, Keegan really got me in the feels, juA reread. In 2021, I rated 3.5*, calling this a predictable narrative and the evil nuns a stereotype. This time, Keegan really got me in the feels, just as she did with Foster a couple of months ago. The truth is that this Church-sanctioned abuse did go on, for decades, and that people who called themselves Christians went along with it, or at the least turned a blind eye. It must have seemed like a system too big to tackle, but take a look at the title. One good man’s small act of rebellion ("contrariness" and "contrarily" are both used for him) is a way of standing up to the injustice and saying that these girls are of worth (indeed, Keegan won the Orwell Prize for political fiction for this). His wife, surely a good person herself, peddles the narrative that rich or poor, people get what they deserve and bring their trouble on himself. But because Bill Furlong himself was born illegitimate, and is a father to five daughters, he’s a feminist almost despite himself. He knows how easily things might have been different for him, how chance more than fate determines our lives.
This time around, I was especially impressed by how much Keegan fits into so few pages, including Bill working out who his father was. We also get a strong sense of a man in the middle of his life: privileged enough, happy enough, but wondering if this is all there is to it; if there is something more on offer. It’s a common feeling and so an appealing prospect that, simply by listening to conscience and living up to our humanity, we might make a difference. Like Foster, this novella is set in the 1980s but feels timeless, and seems to effortlessly encompass so much of what it means to be human. Just absolutely beautiful.
My original review from December 2021:
Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.
This was our second most popular read during last month’s Novellas in November challenge. I’d read a lot about it in fellow bloggers’ posts and newspaper reviews so knew to expect a meticulously chiselled and heartwarming story about a coal merchant in 1980s Ireland who comes to value his quiet family life all the more when he sees how difficult existence is for the teen mothers sent to work in the local convent’s laundry service. Born out of wedlock himself nearly 40 years ago, he is grateful that his mother received kindness and wishes he could do more to help the desperate girls he meets when he makes deliveries to the convent.
I found this a fairly predictable narrative, and the nuns are cartoonishly villainous. So I wasn’t as enthusiastic as many others have been, but still enjoyed having this as one of my reads on my travel day to the USA. I was familiar with the Magdalen Laundries from the movie The Magdalene Sisters and found this a touching reminder to be grateful for what you have while helping those less fortunate....more
This was a DNF for me last year, but I tried again after it made the Booker Prize longlist. The setup is simple: Lucy Barton's ex-husband, William, diThis was a DNF for me last year, but I tried again after it made the Booker Prize longlist. The setup is simple: Lucy Barton's ex-husband, William, discovers he has a half-sister he never knew about. William and Lucy travel from New York City to Maine in hopes of meeting her. For both of them, the quest sparks a lot of questions about how our origins determine who we are, and what William's late mother, Catherine, was running away from and to in leaving her husband and small child behind to forge a different life. Like Lucy, Catherine came from nothing; to an extent, everything that came afterwards for them was a reaction against poverty and neglect. (Lucy keeps insisting that she believes she's invisible, even though she's become well known enough as a novelist that people recognize her in public.)
The difficulty of ever really knowing another person, or even understanding oneself, is one of Strout's recurring messages. There are a lot of strong lines and relatable feelings here (portraying herself and William as little lost children, as each other's only home; the cover's image of herself and her second husband as birds on a wire). What I found kind of maddening, though, is Lucy's tentative phrasing, e.g. "And I cannot explain it except to say--oh, I don't know what to say! Truly, it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say." She employs hedging statements like that all the time; it struck me as false that someone who makes a living by words would be so lacking in confidence about how to say what she means. So I appreciated the psychological insight but found Lucy's voice annoying, even in such a short book. (I'd enjoyed My Name Is Lucy Barton more, and haven't read the intermediate sequel.)...more
(4.5) This has just as much of an environmentalist conscience as The Overstory, but a more intimate scope, focusing on a father and son who journey to(4.5) This has just as much of an environmentalist conscience as The Overstory, but a more intimate scope, focusing on a father and son who journey together in memory and imagination as well as in real life. The novel leaps between spheres: between the public eye, where neurodivergent Robin is a scientific marvel and an environmental activist, and the privacy of family life; between an ailing Earth and the other planets Theo studies; and between the humdrum of daily existence and the magic of another state where Robin can reconnect with his late mother. When I came to the end, I felt despondent and overwhelmed. But as time has passed, the book’s feral beauty has stuck with me. The pure sense of wonder Robin embodies is worth imitating.
A book of two halves, one of which I thoroughly enjoyed; the other I struggled to engage with at all. I remembered vaguely as I was reading that this A book of two halves, one of which I thoroughly enjoyed; the other I struggled to engage with at all. I remembered vaguely as I was reading that this was originally published in two different versions; you wouldn’t know beforehand whether the historical or contemporary storyline would come first. As it happened, my library paperback opened with the contemporary storyline.
New Year’s, and the start of George’s first full year without her mother, a journalist who died of an allergic reaction at age 50. Her mother’s major project was “Subvert,” which used Internet pop-ups to have art comment on politics and vice versa. George remembers conversations with her mother about the nature of history and art, and a trip to Italy. She’s now in therapy, and has a flirty relationship with Helena (H), a mixed-race school friend.
Smith’s typical wordplay comes through in the book’s banter, especially in their George and H’s texts. George is a whip-smart grammar pedant. Her story was a joy to read. There is even a hint of mystery – is it possible her mother was being monitored by MI5? When George skips school to gaze at her mother’s favorite Francesco del Cossa painting in the National Gallery, she thinks she sees Lisa Goliard, her mother’s intense acquaintance, who said she was a bookbinder but acted more like a spy…
The second half imagines a history for Francesco del Cossa, who rises from a brick-making family to become a respected portrait and fresco painter. The artist shares outward similarities with George, such as a dead mother and homoerotic leanings. There are numerous tiny connections, too, some of which I will have missed as my attention waned. In any dual-timeline novel, I prefer the contemporary one and am impatient to get back to it; of course, here, that wasn’t going to happen. (At least in books like Unsheltered and The Liar’s Dictionary there are alternate chapters to look forward to if the historical material gets tedious.) The modern lingo felt all wrong for the time period. I felt Smith wasn’t fully invested in the past, so I wasn’t either.
An intriguing idea, a very promising first half, and then a drift into pretension. Or was that all just my failure to observe and appreciate? (Smith impishly mocks: “only if you notice. If you notice, it changes everything about the picture”) There are still interesting points about art, grief and gender, even without the clever-clever links across time. With her format and her themes Smith questions accepted binaries. But had the story opened with the other Part 1, I may never have gotten anywhere at all with this prize winner (2014 Costa, Goldsmith’s, Saltire and Women’s Prizes).
In general, I find Smith’s recent work (also the Seasons quartet, for example) indulgent for the way she inserts random pop culture references as if they mean something and you’re an idiot if you find them irrelevant. Here, it’s songs like “Let’s Twist Again” and “Georgy Girl” and the 1960s photograph of Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy reproduced on the cover.
Favorite lines:
“Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen.” (one of George’s mother’s most popular Subverts)
“You know, Georgie, nothing’s not connected, her mother says.”
“Seeing and being seen, Georgie, is very rarely simple, her mother says.”
“you who are more than one thing. You who exceed expectations.” (how a stranger describes the painter)
A shorter version of this review first appeared on my blog, Bookish Beck....more
(P.S. However did I forget to mention that the protagonist has a cat called Dr. Butthole?! We have definitely deployed that nickname for our cat a few(P.S. However did I forget to mention that the protagonist has a cat called Dr. Butthole?! We have definitely deployed that nickname for our cat a few times since I read this.)
Priestdaddy is one of my absolute favourite books, so Lockwood’s debut novel was one of the 2021 releases I was most looking forward to reading. It took me a while to warm to, but ultimately did not disappoint. It probably helped that I was familiar with the author’s iconoclastic sense of humour. This is a work of third-person autofiction – much more so than I’d realized before I read the Acknowledgments – and to start with it feels like a flippant skewering of modern life, which for some is all about online personality and performance. A woman who became a social media star by tweeting quips like “Can a dog be twins?” reflects on life on “the portal” and under “the dictator.”
“This did not feel like real life, exactly, but nowadays what did?”
“as long as she read the news, line by line and minute by minute, she had some say in what happened, didn’t she?”
Midway through the book, she receives a wake-up call in the form of texts from her mother summoning her back to the Midwest for a family emergency.
“If all she was was funny, and none of this was funny, where did that leave her?”
“It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life.”
(view spoiler)[Her sister is pregnant and they’ve just learned that the baby has Proteus Syndrome (what “the Elephant Man” had) and is unlikely to survive. Ohio’s draconian abortion laws rule out a medical abortion, so the only option for her sister is to deliver the baby by emergency C-section at the earliest age of viability. Being an aunt and godmother gives her a new sense of purpose and puts everything into perspective, making her online achievements seem meaningless. “We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her. I can give her my minutes. What was I doing with them before?” Despite the whole family’s desperate love, care, and undivided attention, the baby girl only lives for six months and a day. (hide spoiler)]
Shit just got real, as they say. But “Would it change her?” she asks herself. Apparently, this very thing happened to Lockwood’s own family, which accounts for how heartfelt the second half is – still funny, but with an ache behind it, the same that I sensed and loved in Priestdaddy. The story had unexpected personal poignance for me as well, in that (view spoiler)[the baby has seizures because of her abnormal brain development, and my 18-month-old goddaughter has epilepsy that may have an as-yet-diagnosed deeper cause (hide spoiler)].
It is the about-face that truly makes this novel, forcing readers to question the value of a digital existence based on glib pretence. As the protagonist tells her students at one point, “Your attention is holy,” and with life so fragile there is no time to waste. Horrible and beautiful things coexist.
What Lockwood is trying to do with this book is even bigger than that, though, I think. She mocks the idea of plot yet takes up the mantle of the “social novel,” as if she’s creating a whole new format for the Internet-age novel, in short, digestible sections. I’m not sure this is quite as earth-shattering as all that, but it is both entertaining and deceptively deep and should make readers consider to what extent they’ve succumbed to “internet poisoning.”
It feels like a very current and topical book and so plays the role that Weather did in last year’s Women’s Prize race, such that I hope it will make it through to the shortlist....more
Summer 1920, North Yorkshire. Tom Birkin, a First World War veteran whose wife has left him, arrives in Oxgodby to uncover the local church’s wall paiSummer 1920, North Yorkshire. Tom Birkin, a First World War veteran whose wife has left him, arrives in Oxgodby to uncover the local church’s wall painting of the Judgment Day, assumed to be the work of a medieval monk and long since whitewashed over. With nothing waiting for him back in London and no plans beyond this commission, he gives himself over to the daily rhythms of working, eating and sleeping – “There was so much time that marvelous summer.” This simple life is punctuated by occasional incidents like a Sunday school hayride and picnic, and filling in as a lay preacher at a nearby chapel. Also embarked on a quest into the past is Charles Moon, who is searching for the grave of their patroness’ ancestor in the churchyard. Moon, too, has a war history he’d rather forget.
Though it barely exceeds 100 pages, this novella is full of surprises – about Moon, about the presumed identity and fate of the centuries-dead figures he and Birkin come to be obsessed with, and about the emotional connection that builds between Birkin and Reverend Keach’s wife, Alice. “It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies,” Birkin declares, but did he take his own advice? There is something achingly gorgeous about this not-quite-love story, as evanescent as ideal summer days. Carr writes in a foreword that he intended to write “a rural idyll along the lines of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree.” He indeed created something Hardyesque with this tragicomic rustic romance; I was also reminded of another very English classic I reviewed earlier in the year: Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. (A contemporary readalike: The Offing by Benjamin Myers.)
(3.5) This short, intense novel is about two women locked into resentful competition. Tara and Antara also happen to be mother and daughter. When the (3.5) This short, intense novel is about two women locked into resentful competition. Tara and Antara also happen to be mother and daughter. When the long-divorced Tara shows signs of dementia, artist Antara and her American-born husband Dilip take her into their home in Pune, India. Her mother’s criticism and strange behavior stir up flashbacks to the 1980s and 1990s, when Antara felt abandoned by Tara during the four years they lived in an ashram and then her time at boarding school. Emotional turmoil led to medical manifestations like excretory issues and an eating disorder, and both women fell in love in turn with a homeless photographer named Reza Pine.
When Antara learns she is pregnant, the whole cycle of guilt and maternal ambivalence looks set to start again. Memory is precarious and full of potential hurt here, and Antara’s impassive narration is perfectly suited to the story of a toxic relationship. Neither the UK title nor the one for the original Indian publication (Girl in White Cotton) seems quite right to me; I might have chosen something related to the cover and endpaper image of the aloe plant: something that is as spiky as a cactus yet holds out hope of balm. This was a good fictional follow-up to a memoir I read earlier in the year about dementia’s effect on an Indian-American mother–daughter pair, What We Carry by Maya Shanbhag Lang.
Favorite passages:
“It seems to me now that this forgetting is convenient, that she doesn’t want to remember the things she has said and done. It feels unfair that she can put away the past from her mind while I’m brimming with it all the time. I fill papers, drawers, entire rooms with records, notes, thoughts, while she grows foggier with each passing day.”
“I will never be free of her. She’s in my marrow and I’ll never be immune.”
