The Brooklyn Rail

Irish author Megan Nolan has written two novels now, the titles of which neatly represent fatal flaws that set nearly all fiction in motion. First there’s Nolan’s 2022 debut Acts of Desperation which suggests conflicts brought about by action—extremes, last chances, final warnings. Gone Girl. Double Indemnity. Hamlet. The title of Nolan’s latest, Ordinary Human Failings brings to mind the regrets of inaction—mundane sufferings, paralysis by analysis: The Remains of the Day. The Dead.

As for Nolan’s fiction, the two novels are substantively different. Acts of Desperation is an unsettling plunge into love, lust, and obsession—Fleabag meets Fifty Shades of Grey, as reimagined by Ottessa Moshfegh. The unnamed twenty-something narrator stumbles about, trying to figure out how to be an adult woman, with—or despite—a weakness for drugs, drink, and the affections of men, in particular a dreamy (at first) Dane named Ciaran.

Early on, Nolan almost dares readers to see Acts of Desperation as a mere chronicle of what her own narrator calls the “sordid checkpoints of the wounded woman.” But the narrator’s heart and soul emerge, even as she’s being careless, reckless—a “thing built for use and base pleasures.” Ciaran turns out to be an uptight creep, and—like the reader—Nolan’s narrator doesn’t really have a clue why she hangs in there so long.

“How impoverished my internal life had become,” she declares, “scrabbling for a token of love from somebody who didn't want to offer it.” In the end, Acts of Desperation is a disturbing, moving portrait of contemporary relationships, and the men and women who make them so damn disturbing.

Nolan’s new novel also touches upon such material but is far more ambitious. Ordinary Human Failings has a larger cast, most of them members of an Irish immigrant family in England. Nolan also alternates her settings, moving between 1970s Waterford, and London in the early 1990s. Things begin placidly enough. Carmel Green moves about her flat, working away at chores, her mind buzzing with memories—mourning her mother, dreaming of some kind of escape. “She wasn't sure what she was doing exactly,” Carmel thinks, “but felt that if there was any time to lose herself in new sex, it was now, in the mud of grief.”

Carmel is then interrupted by her daughter, Lucy, “scream(ing) that everyone was down in the courtyard playing a game and could she go, too.” Thus, a series of unfortunate events are set in motion, which end with one child dead and another in police custody. Ordinary Human Failings becomes a kind of existential murder mystery, a meditation on true crime—including the requisite podcast-ish commentary, courtesy of a prodding, probing British journalist named Tom Hargreaves.

Tom and his editor smell the sensational blood of a ripping tabloid yarn. They sequester the Green family in a hotel, and sit them down for chats that fall somewhere between interviews and interrogations. Tom tries every manipulative trick to open them up, which (it must be said) is not so different from what Nolan also does, albeit with more sensitivity and sympathy. The narrative then begins to bob and weave—and occasionally stumble and lurch—into the Greens’ past, the messy lives behind the shocking headlines that haven't even been written yet.

Carmel’s pregnancy is traumatic and sad, and her mother Rose holds her daughter up more or less heroically. A brother looms in the shadows—decent, irresponsible, vaguely dangerous. We also explore the ever-complicated relationship between Ireland and “old enemy England,” as Carmel’s Da put it. (It’s no coincidence that the family name is Green.) A storyteller like Tom positions the Greens as a “questionable family,” which is another way of saying that the Greens are “misanthropic Irish degenerates who it was fair to assume lived at least partially off the welfare state and that offered nothing but parasitic consumption and now a horrific crime to the great nation of Britain they had seen fit to settle in.”

Worse, Carmel sees why people might think such things—about the Greens, about the Irish, with their playground games “almost too embarrassing for [Carmel] to say … called IRA.” And their fights and brawls, in which dogs as well as fists are thrown, and distant yet visceral memories of the “poorhouse.” It is from such a shameful haze that Derek O’Toole emerges, fittingly enough at a St. Patrick’s Day parade, where he strikes Carmel as unusually “civilized,” a “sad rarity in boys.” An ensuing (very troubling) love affair yields some of Nolan's most powerful scenes. A “fog of … despair” settles over Carmel’s pregnancy, a “conviction that she would simply not allow this to take place” which at one point leads her to “stop eating,” to “starve the thing out.”

Famine or hunger strikes needn’t be mentioned explicitly. Not with Nolan’s delicate yet powerful characterizations, which illustrate immigrant homesickness not by missed friends or good times but neglected gravestones in cemeteries. At times, Nolan’s portrait of this extraordinary family feels like a novel told through short stories. “The secret,” Carmel says to Tom, “is that … we’re just an ordinary family, with ordinary unhappiness like yours.” Our overall impressions of the Green family occasionally feel more hazy, or diffuse, than sharp. Riskier still, as Nolan’s conclusion approaches, the years start flying by, and Tom, the storyteller, is joined by a shrink. So, some of the Greens’ details and memories start to feel excessively mediated, over-interpreted.

None of which lessens what is another bravura performance by Megan Nolan. Perhaps most impressive of all, she confronts dark matters without tumbling into bleak despondency. “Who would care about a family like theirs?” Carmel wonders. “Theirs were ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note.” Nolan, of course, makes readers see otherwise. Even when people like Tom—any shaper or purveyor of “narrative content”—rarely do. And even if we—readers with our own biases and expectations, with a weakness for too much pre-packaged trauma—are similarly implicated.

In the end, Carmel is left with “something like fondness or a grudging admiration … toward life itself, how persistent and absurd and reckless a force it could be.” For all of their troubles, Carmel says of her family all that can ever really be said: “Still, they tried. The trying would be the life’s work.”