A debut novel that focuses on a most unusual family
This week there’s a mixed bunch of fiction, novels that are all very different but they’re all engaging.
The Steps, Juliano Zaffino, Tramp Press, €16
This debut novel focuses on a most unusual family, one with a backstory in Canada that is only hinted at and never fully revealed, but the reader suspects that something happened over there to prompt the strange goings-on when the entire family moves to the UK.
When Derek meets his childhood sweetheart Sophie again, after decades, they fall in love. Newly widowed Sophie has returned to England for a relative’s funeral and afterwards, packs her four children up, leaves Canada and joins Derek to start a new life with him and the kids. Derek is an over-anxious new stepfather and almost immediately the strain starts to show.
These children are not quite normal and as time progresses and their mother becomes ill, it’s up to Derek to ‘rule the roost’ but things don’t work out. And then Jules, the adorable middle child, dies. To say more would be to spoil, but this family saga is as creepy as anything Shirley Jackson or even an early Stephen King might have put together, and the writing is beautifully crafted.
Zaffino has already garnered notice with his short fiction and this first novel, unusually structured but thoroughly engrossing, is excellent.
Rituals, Danielle McLaughlin, Stinging Fly Press, €15
Cork woman Danielle McLaughlin is not the most prolific writer, which makes the arrival of a new book an event to look forward to. And she doesn’t disappoint with her latest novel. Joan is a civil servant in late middle age, single and a creature of habit, who’s been forced to take a career break.
The details of why that has occurred are on slow-reveal throughout the story and they’re both funny and heartbreaking. She takes in a student lodger who, she specifies in her ad, must be reading English Lit. And English Lit student Diarmuid arrives.
Their acclimatising to each other is also funny but very compassionately depicted. Joan and Diarmuid have trouble with their neighbour next door, her stinky chickens and her wilful robot lawnmower, and besides Joan has other issues to worry about, like Diarmuid’s idea of what a clean bedroom looks like. She will discover that Diarmuid has family issues and will need to chuck herself rather forcibly out of her tremulous comfort zone to help him, but by god she’s going to help him; no force on earth will stop her.
Exploring issues of generational estrangement, the scourge of OCD, the potential scourge of ‘blended’ family, and the shrinking of a life when purposeful work is removed, this is one of the finest novels I’ve read this year. If you like Elizabeth Strout or Anne Tyler – I can think of no Irish writer who’s got quite the kind of microscope McLaughlin possesses – you’re in for a rare treat.
Honey, Imani Thompson, The Borough Press, €16.99
A come-uppance novel set in academia, here the reader encounters Yrse, a PhD student who doesn’t intend to kill a nasty professor of hers, she could have stopped him dying from anaphylactic shock, but where’s the fun in that?
The first of Yrse’s victims was not a man she she’d ever thought of killing, but a stray bee in his lemonade did the trick all the same. And when Yrse realises how easy it is to actually kill someone, she gets a bit of a grá for it!
And this PhD student of Jamaican heritage has other axes to grind among the privileged white males she’s encountered recently, whose attitudes to women are toxic and who have done some bad things.
This novel is a step inside the mind of a serial killer who found her ‘vocation’ almost by accident but is happy to pursue her new occupation by fair means or foul. Well, mostly foul. It’s entertaining and tightly written, and it has lots to say about how far some men still need to go in accepting women as their equals.
Into the Wreck, Susannah Dickey, Bloomsbury, €16.99
Susannah Dickey has already made a huge name for herself in poetry circles and is a multi-award winner for her poetry volumes. Her third novel places her in a similar spot for her fiction. It’s a family saga, beautifully crafted, focusing on how a family mourns the death of their mostly estranged father.
Three Derry siblings, Anna, Gemma and Matthew, have to handle the suicide and funeral of their quiet and emotionally unavailable father, long since divorced from their forthright ultra-sociable mother.
The story is told from the viewpoint of five people; each of the children, their mother and their aunt, who’s always had a reputation as a bit of a maverick. Their situation is not that of losing someone who’s been in a sickbed for a long stretch of time, but rather a sudden loss.
Their father killed himself by jumping off the Foyle Bridge. This novel explores how these five characters, two of them worldly and jaded, the three children barely emerging into young adulthood, come to terms with his death.
Everything that is Beautiful, Louise Nealon, Manilla Press, €16.99
In Nealon’s second novel, it’s family again that’s her focus and perhaps she poses the question: is there any kind of family at all that isn’t dysfunctional? The two families in the centre of this novel are as banjaxed as any others, but community and parish and reputation, especially within the local GAA club, is what matters and everything else be damned.
An upcoming wedding threatens to unpick the carefully stitched social threads that the Foleys and the Ryans have respectively embroidered around themselves. When lives fall apart, people do strange things. And fleeing to Belfast or staying in guesthouses under assumed names doesn’t only aggravate the emotional havoc.
It’s a kind of #MeToo story set within a GAA hurling and camogie background and again, Nealon has excelled herself in taking a peek into the human heart and finding it sorely wanting.
Footnotes
If a family outing and taking the kids to a farm is appealing, check out the Flavours of Fingal Festival this weekend, July 4 and 5. See flavoursoffingal.ie for details.