A Month of Reading - Five Books From February
Donal Ryan, Sally Rooney, Jo Nesbo, Jo Spain and Paul Auster featured on my reading list last month.
This year I have committed myself to reading as many books as possible. I want to take inspiration and learn from forms, writers and subjects that I might not usually consider. Last month’s selection featured Donal Ryan’s award winning debut novel The Spinning Heart, Mr Salary, a short story from Sally Rooney, crime fiction from Jo Spain (Dirty Little Secrets), and Jo Nesbo (Headhunters) and the much lauded City of Glass from Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy.
To support my writing please consider taking out a subscription to the JasonWard Creative Substack which will give you access to hundreds of articles, interviews, reviews, podcasts, videos, playlists and a whole range of new fiction as well.
The Spinning Heart - Donal Ryan
This book was Donal Ryan’s debut novel and it is a perfect bridge between his short stories and the longer form. The setting is rural Ireland right after the Celtic Tiger Crash that left the country on its knees and confused like a boxer who had been easily winning a fight but opens their eyes to see the ref counting them out. In just three years the country saw its national income plummet by 17% and the shock continues to influence policy making and people’s ways of living today.
The Spinning Heart draws on the societal emotional distress this calamity caused. It is written in a series of first person vignettes, each offering a slightly different perspective on an event or concept and introducing something new which is then expanded upon and added to by the next narrator.
The book also has one of the greatest opening paragraphs ever written;
“My father still lives back down the road past the weir in the cottage I was reared in. I go there every day to see is he dead and every day he lets me down. He hasn’t missed a day of letting me down.”
Much is revealed about Ireland and its rapid change from social, economic and cultural backwater into a modern progressive nation. The problem that the book illuminates is that the past and its scarring are not that far behind. So while the shiny exterior of new buildings glittered in the sunlight of economic success, the rest of society had difficulty keeping pace. This is a country in which contraception was illegal until 1979 when it became available from doctors but only for married couples. It was not until 1991 that Irish adults could legally purchase condoms in a shop.
The unspoken and accepted abuse inflicted by fathers husbands and the church all damaged the psyche and let to judgements passed without understanding on those who are ‘other’ - the treatment of a single mother has a clanging overtone of the Magdalene Laundries era which only ended in 1996.
(Discover more about the the Magdalene Laundries HERE)
The characters take you into their confidence so you half believe them until you read the next chapter or the one after that which dispels one myth and plants a fresh point of view in its place.
Donal Ryan’s exceptional writing places you in the setting rather than treating you as an external observer. The changing POVs give the book a pace and a very clever device for piecing together character and plot with more than a hint of Under Milk Wood about the how the story is told. Above all, however, The Spinning Heart is an emotional book that will make you laugh, will shock you and make you cry - but hopefully not a RyanAir flight between Birmingham and Cork that is also carrying 35 members of a Welsh rugby club on their way to a weekend pub crawl around the Rebel City.
Read Donal Ryan’s tips on short story writing HERE
Dirty Little Secrets - Jo Spain
Dirty Little Secrets was Irish writer Jo Spain’s sixth best selling novel in four years. This is a prolific output that is usually only matched by romance writers. The book is kind of a closed room murder mystery that takes place in a small gated community near Dublin called Withered Vale. It offers a good deal of social comment on how Ireland has changed, how the middle class behave and how we as a society treat each other - much of this comment is nicely barbed and sharply bitchy. Which I loved!
The influence of Spain’s screenwriting hangs over the book with either first person narration from the now dead victim, Olive, or heaps of dialogue from the characters living in the other six houses on the estate and the detectives who are investigating what looks like a suspicious death. In fact the book could well have been written with an eye to screen adaptation.
We discover that Olive, lives in a house that had stood alone in a field for many years. The owner of the field decided to develop the land and left Olive’s small traditional cottage standing but surrounded it with much larger, more modern buildings occupied by characters who hover on the border between interesting and stereotypical; the single guy with a porn addiction, the lady killer who is sleeping with a married neighbour and Olive, the couple who are always travelling and may have defrauded their family. It is classic Golden Age stuff which could just as easily be called ‘The Mystery of Withered Vale’ - which would give it Gothic overtones and reduce its appeal to the middle classes.
And it is the middle classes that will see themselves reflected back and skewered in this book; the couples in marriages that are coming apart but have the resource to get therapy or change their work patterns, the porn addict who has access to mental health support and the well off couple who can afford to escape at the first sign of trouble. Spain writes wonderful characters that she doesn’t really like and takes delight in peeling back the vanilla veneer of white collar expectations, tastes and lives; buying the biggest house you cannot afford or becoming vegan and calling your son Wolf.
The ending is best described as ‘non-traditional’. The author uses it to show us that not everything in life ends up totally wrapped up and that sometimes the people we thought were nice can be right nasty bastards.
Dirty Little Secrets is a great, fun read on the surface with a vicious little punch of social comment just below. I would have preferred a bit more real physical or psychological danger (although someone did get a punch in the face), and a sense of jeopardy or even threat for any of the characters.
Dirty Little Secrets draws you into believing that you’re in for a cozy crime read. You get yourself a cup of your favourite relaxing hot drink, put on a warm jumper and maybe light the fire. As you get to the end you realise that the fire went out halfway through, your jumper has been eaten by moths and is falling off your body and that sweet soothing cup of Ovaltine has some kind of bitter aftertaste and why do I feel a little dizzy…
Headhunters - Jo Nesbo
Oh God - don’t make me say it! Jo Nesbo’s lead character in Headhunters, Roger Brown, is unlikeable! Yes he is. He’s a calculating, cynical piece of shit who cares little for anything except being seen as the best Executive Recruiter in Oslo. But it turns out that there is a reason for his being so awful; he has a beautiful wife who runs a loss making art gallery and because he is not tall and handsome he needs to prove his worthiness through his finances. Even learning this, we don’t like him but we do want to find out more about him.
This is twisty and twisted story with plenty of gratuitous, painful violence that is graphically described. It also has one of the grossest scenes ever written when Roger climbs down a toilet and hides in a septic tank breathing through a rapidly softening cardboard toilet roll. EEUURGH! I was left wondering if Nesbo has a grudge against Executive Recruiters from his time working in finance because Brown and his fellow recruiters all seem like they deserve to bathe in cess pits.
The thing is, despite all the nastiness, bitterness and cynicism, this is a really well written, well paced and fascinating read. The characters change and justice is kind of served in a warped and perverse manner. The action is propulsive and the plot is tight and well thought through. Reading Headhunters is like becoming a nurse; once you get used to all the bodily secretions and the screaming, it’s actually very rewarding.
Mr Salary - Sally Rooney
I got this short story on Borrow Box which is a free ebook lending app supplied by the Irish Library Service. Rooney’s writing has an emotional nakedness that can make you gulp as you recognise your own inner self, thoughts or voice. Mr Salary goes there too. Lead character Sukie who is a 20 something woman whose immediate family has disintegrated through death and illness. She is now living with a family friend, Nathan, who is nearly 40 and earning an ‘hilarious salary’ after his start up was bought by Google. Sukie’s father is dying of leukaemia and his decline is mirrored by the rising importance of Nathan in her life as both a father figure and lover.
There is some sense that this prize winning story is a prototype for Intermezzo and other Rooney books because it explores forensically the emotional development of people establishing ‘non-conventional’ relationships. There is the sense that the people in the relationship have built their world and it makes sense to them; their challenge is lining up the edges of their own creation with the expectations, opinions and supposed norms of society at large. When Sukie says
“When will we know if this was a bad idea or not? Should we already know? Because now it feels good.’
We understand that it can only be a bad idea to someone else.
You can read Mr Salary as it first appeared in The Irish Times HERE
City of Glass - Paul Auster
City of Glass is the first novella in Auster’s much celebrated New York Trilogy. The concept and set up are absolutely brilliant; a telephone call in the middle of the night asking for someone who is not there. The person responding, Quinn a writer of detective novels, decides to pretend to be the private detective that the caller is looking for. Why not?
It is a great opening. After this it all gets a bit meta and Kafka-esque for the next 130 odd pages, swinging between an actual detective tale, some dense theorising and a forensic love letter to Manhattan that reads like a talking street map.
Oh but it’s so clever isn't it?
The book was described as “shatteringly clever” by the Sunday Telegraph and I think the basic premise is extraordinary. But, City of Glass feels like a writing exercise that gives the reader a work out rather than any kind of fulfilling literary experience. There is, for example, a conversation between the fictional writer, Quinn, pretending to be Paul Auster and the actual writer Paul Auster, presumably being himself. They talk about the origins of The Man of La Mancha which I think is meant as some kind of chortling intellectual observation that only ends up reminding me of when Borat met the posh kids of theatre group Ubersausage at the Edinburgh Festival. They had a knock knock joke about prime numbers which was so clever it forgot to be funny (or actually clever).
The book is a clever concept and the discussions about Cervantes and the Tower of Babel are intelligent but I found City of Glass cold and difficult to care about. I forced myself to get to the end of the story because I thought it would resolve or reveal its literary beauty. It did not.
I did not enjoy City of Glass and have tried to understand why. Maybe I need to understand more clearly why Quinn decides to become a private detective or why does he completely fuck up his own life and wind up living in an alleyway, completely broke and homeless? Why does he not pay his rent or cash the cheques he was getting paid? Maybe Quinn was neither a writer or a detective but just a fantasist or suffering from deep seated delusions.
City of Glass is an interesting idea ruined by an over large portion of intellectualism for its own sake.
To support my writing please consider taking out a subscription to the JasonWard Creative Substack which will give you access to hundreds of articles, interviews, reviews, podcasts, videos, playlists and a whole range of new fiction as well.