The Brooklyn Rail

There are two ways of denying reality: silence and sensationalism. This is the subject of Megan Nolan’s sophomore novel, the story of a child killed on a British council estate and the Irish immigrant family of Lucy Green, the little girl suspected of the crime. The novel is set primarily in the years after Thatcher and before New Labour, when the social fabric of English society had been shredded along with the social safety net, and both were still unraveling at the seams. The set-up has the sordid shape of a tabloid hit, and, indeed, the novel is framed by a striving tabloid reporter’s effort to land the story, seeing it as “a major, state-of-the-nation type piece,” about how “feckless foreign wanderers with a whiff of abuse and chaos turn on the Deserving Poor.”

It is crucial to Nolan’s narrative that the lives of Lucy’s family members have the form of a tabloid’s tropes—a girl unmarried and pregnant, an alcoholic brother, an angry and distant father—and that they nonetheless resist its simplifications. Her novel is a commentary on form—a tabloid story told as a novel stretches and deepens, grows sadder and stranger and less sensational. It is, in this way, a novel in defense of the novel. The difference between tragedies scandalous and standard is more in circumstance and structure than in kind.

The novel shifts its attention back and forth between the reporter, Lucy, and her family—Carmel, her mother; Richie, her uncle; and John, her grandfather. As they reveal themselves, the novel also shifts between timelines, the 1990s present in Britain and the remembered past in Ireland. It is at its best in backstory, Nolan’s prose gentle and furious, her insights psychologically astute and empathetic. Nolan describes Carmel’s discovery of her pregnancy, following an early and ordinary heartbreak, and her subsequent dissociation and denial. She tries to end her pregnancy herself, even as she refuses to acknowledge what she is doing. “That it must be made to leave her body,” is, to her, “so obvious and necessary that there was no way to verbalise it, not even in the privacy of her own head.” When she fails, she lapses into finely drawn dissociation and denial, paradoxically hiding her pregnancy and willing herself to not believe in it as “the threads of her mind had come loose and knotted together in nonsensical new iterations, so that when she tied a belt around her stomach or wore a big loose dress, her mind was only taking actions to make an appearance accord with the actual reality, which was that she was not pregnant.” Nolan describes, too, Richie’s deteriorating alcoholism and his attempts to negotiate with it. The Greens share a sense that they once had promise, that their lives could have been different from the way they are, and Nolan is especially heartbreaking in her description of failed hopes. When they move to London to escape the embarrassment of Carmel’s pregnancy, Richie decides he will get his drinking in hand, allowing himself only his least favorite drinks. “This was,” Nolan writes, “the compromise he made, after eighty hours of sobriety, heading into his new life, broken within a month.”

For all their sense of ruined possibility, the Greens each believe themselves to be, in some inherent and fundamental way, bad, and their actions or even their circumstances and misfortunes—poverty enabling the shame of industrial accidents (“a freak thing, the sort which arose every few years at the processing plant”), unintended pregnancies, susceptibility to addiction—serve merely as confirmation for the outside world, something that makes their inner badness visible. The novel is deeply concerned with the relationship between inner privacy and outward appearance, with what it means to be good or bad, and what, in the equation, is the balance between one’s private estimation and the judgment of others (Richie’s “personal self-soothing mantra,” borrowed from a schoolteacher, is “I’m a good person and other people think so too.” When pressed, Richie does not believe this to be true.). Silence, its privacy and secrecy, is fiercely guarded by Carmel—she refuses to tell her family the name of Lucy’s father, “not out of loyalty … but because she wanted a private thought of her own. Her life was over now, she knew that. Wasn’t she owed one little thing nobody else could see?” It is, for many of the characters, easier to be silent, to accede to a willed misunderstanding of oneself and of one’s loved ones, than to reconcile oneself to reality. But this same privacy, these silences, fester and hurt. A teacher recalls seeing Lucy in the bathroom after an incident in which she hurt another child on the playground. Lucy, tiny and fragile, was standing by “a sink, which she was striking her forehead against, with silent, eerily efficient brutality.” The teacher recalls this as “something rent from a terrible and unknowable privacy, that it defied description or standard professional reportage.” With her daughter in police custody, Carmel finally has an “appalling moment of suddenly comprehending the network of absences and silences she had facilitated which had led to this point.”

The same teacher recalls accidentally glimpsing her sister crying when they were young: “she suspected that Eloise was in far worse pain than she had ever known, suffering in the recesses of a privacy so total that it was almost evil. She had never fully lost this terror of the private suffering of other people, nor the shame of wanting not to see it.” This impulse to turn away from the private pain of others is not at odds with an impulse to gawk at the scandal and melodrama of a tabloid story; it is of a piece with it. It feels almost just that Tom, the tabloid reporter desperate to exploit this family’s hardship and resentful that the “vague darkness revealed to him by each member of the family held no narrative coherence when placed together,” is less a richly developed character and more a narrative device. To Tom, there is “no story besides the death of an infant.” He cannot see that reality looked at squarely often fails to cohere. His presence serves to underline the novel’s concerns about the squalidness of spectatorship and about the necessary failure of a tabloid tale to ever deliver, its flatness belying its supposed goal and revealing a truer, more disturbing desire to see only the surface of things.