For someone who doesn’t usually much enjoy reading about family dramas and relationships, I sure am, well, starting to enjoy it. This little book club of ours is changing me in ways I couldn’t have foreseen.
Speaking of unforeseen, I expect novels to be weighty, chapter-dense bodies of text. This book surprised me by being 500-word-ish bites, almost flash fiction or micro-stories, and oh, what words! I could fall back in love with life, despite its pains and fears, by focusing as Ryan does on exquisite moments of aliveness. Each chapter with its one-word name is like a sun-bleached snapshot in a family album, a bead on a rosary chain. A perfect novel for the attention-challenged, a delicious plate of bon bons.
It’s so much about women, this book. It’s interesting that, in an era when writers are told to stay in their lane and only write about people who are like themselves – how dare you write about or presume to know the experience of gay people when you’re straight, or Chinese people when you’re American – a number of men are writing about women and getting away with it. It’s true of this book and the last we read. Maybe they wouldn’t get away with it if they didn’t also pull it off so successfully.
I can sort of see that prescriptive point of view, but also believe that writers don’t create characters but become possessed by them, whoever and whatever they might be. We don’t really choose.
This book made me cry sometimes. But it’s also wonderfully funny. The latter kept me going through the former. And isn’t that just life, really?
What did you think?
oh, mercy, I forgot to get a copy and haven't read it. But this review and Marian's comment have made me determined to read it soon. Better late than never.... I'm still recovering from the haunting Bee Sting, by the way. Never would have found that book without our wee club. Every morning when I go out and see the skirls, I think of it.
Loved it! He really embodied the fierce spirit of real Irish women who were my original cultural conditioning. I’d hazard a guess he grew up with them to know them so well. And was a focused observer.