5 minute read
LIFE WITHOUT CHILDREN by Roddy Doyle
supportive wife, Marley, the most sharply drawn character in a first novel bristling with dangerous energy. When Trent and assistant coach Bull Kennedy find Travis beaten to death, everyone assumes that Billy has finally turned on his tormentor. But Trent, who took Billy into his home when his mother, Tina, vamoosed with his baby brother, doubles down on his ability to offer the boy salvation, and Lorna, Trent’s teenage daughter, makes Billy her personal project. You can just imagine how well everyone’s plans for escape turn out.
Friday Night Darks.
LIFE WITHOUT CHILDREN
Doyle, Roddy Viking (192 pp.) $25.00 | Feb. 22, 2022 978-0-59-330056-5
In each of these 10 stories we enter a life and a marriage—either intact, fraying, or sundered—within which the various and frequently unexpected effects of the Covid-19 lockdown on Irish society are depicted with irresistible irreverence.
From the first story to the last, this instantly engaging chronicle of life during the pandemic lockdown in Ireland resonates with the voices of ordinary Dubliners who are enduring—and in an odd way relishing—the unprecedented social restrictions and upheaval that, in some cases, deliver hidden freedoms. “It was a decision,” a woman says of fleeing her suburban existence in “Gone.” “Just, I hadn’t packed a bag...or thought about what I’d need to take....But when I heard the word. Lockdown. I was out of the house. Out of that life. I shut the door after me.” Alan in “Life Without Children,” like most characters here, has reached the crisis age when the children are grown and gone, his parents are dead, and now he is “the oldest person he knew well,” a fact that “pleased him and kept him awake.” His wife leaves him, and he leaves his previous life to enter a more precarious one, as does each of the protagonists here, mostly by accident. A father walks the Dublin streets looking for the son he has driven away with his cruelty. A husband falls in love with his wife after decades of marriage only to face the terror of almost losing her to Covid-19. A son cruelly treated by his dying mother, ostracized by his family, and still drunk on the morning of the funeral he cannot attend tries to make sense of his kitchen, the contents of his fridge, the family pet: “He won’t be falling over again. He looked down at the dog, at his feet. —That right, Jim?” Humor of every shade, from near-slapstick to keen satire, prevents the collection’s moments of emotional insight from congealing into sentimentality. And Dublin itself, the broad streets and the even broader range of its natives’ speech—so pungent and quick—has rarely been so deftly captured.
A moving and quick-witted portrait of Dublin lives under lockdown.
LOVE
Eitan, Maayan Penguin Press (112 pp.) $20.00 | Feb. 15, 2022 978-0-593-29969-2
A stream-of-consciousness–style narrative told by an Israeli sex worker.
The narrator of Eitan’s feverish debut doesn’t have a name. She calls herself Libby at one point, but that’s clearly a kind of disguise—she’s a sex worker. No
dead collections
need for real names. Although what is real, anyway? The novel, which could (and perhaps should) be devoured in a single sitting, plays with our longing for truth, our idea that a comprehensive story will tell us how we got to where we are. Libby starts in the second person. “You were blond,” she writes. “No; your hair was as black as a raven, and curly. You were born in Saint Petersburg. No no: your parents came from America.” How Libby came to this particular line of work and how—or whether—she leaves is never made clear. Eitan’s style is more impressionistic: She lingers on sensory moments rather than explication or plot. The book was apparently a runaway success in Israel, where the story is set, and it’s easy to see why. The prose has a livid energy, and the storytelling is as brutal as it is relentless. Libby, or whatever her name is, never seems to feel much of anything. When, late in the book, the story hints toward violence, there’s a feeling of relief—not because Libby has freed herself; there doesn’t seem to be any sort of freedom in this context—but because she’s taken definite action. Or she hasn’t. Just as the reader most craves concrete detail, a solid sense of whatever might be happening, Eitan’s focus grows even fuzzier. That might be the book’s only flaw—and it might not even be a flaw.
Intensely vivid, lyrical, and raw, Eitan’s debut is as disturbing as it is moving.
DEAD COLLECTIONS
Fellman, Isaac Penguin (256 pp.) $17.00 paper | Feb. 22, 2022 978-0-14-313691-0
An archivist who happens to be a vampire receives a collection belonging to the late creator of a cult TV show, triggering a series of dramatic life shifts. Even before he became a vampire— spurred by a freak case of tetanus, after which his body must be sustained by blood transfusions and religiously shielded from the sun—Sol Katz had always lived somewhat apart from others. A trans man who, for years pretransition, inhabited a body he “[couldn’t] bear to have touched,” Sol has always worked “best with imaginary or fictitious people,” first as a fan fiction writer and then a steadfastly patient archivist at the Historical Society of Northern California. Sol’s reclusive life, though, is disrupted when the magnetic Elsie brings in a collection belonging to Tracy Britton, her dead wife, the creator of the science-fiction TV show Feet of Clay. Coincidentally, this is the fandom in which Sol used to write. Almost instantly, Sol’s world is shaken as he forms an intimate bond with Elsie, who is stubbornly vulnerable and unequivocally herself; and as he goes through Tracy’s papers, he relives the journey he’s taken to understand his own gender identity. As he and Elsie grow closer, he must contend with the nearly frightening experience of desire for the first time in years and the risks inherent in a sexual relationship with a human—to whom vampire bites can be dangerous. As Sol’s life threatens to disintegrate around him—Tracy’s collection inexplicably decays before his
