The Brooklyn Rail

In Caoilinn Hughes’s new novel, four sisters confront a troubled past and face a collective future in an Irish farmhouse. The novel unfolds over alternating chapters written from each sister’s point of view with a central section that takes the form of a two-act play. While the structure shift feels a bit clunky at first, it’s a brilliant device that allows direct dialogue and action when the sisters are together in the farmhouse, while also giving a nod to the powerful tradition of the Irish farmhouse drama. But the Flattery sisters are far from traditional: three hold Ph.D.s in their respective fields and one is an Instagram culinary star. While robust characters in their own right, each serves to represent a different aspect of our collective grappling with global crises: representative politics, education, healthcare, food insecurity, and climate disaster. At the center of the novel is a question: what does it mean to center one’s work on slowing our collective hurtling toward destruction? For the four Flattery sisters, that work takes different shapes but each is positioned as an “alternative.”

When the eldest sister, Olwen, a geology professor and stepmother to two young boys, walks away from her career and family, her three younger sisters decide to search for her—whether or not she wants to be found. As the eldest, Olwen was their de facto parent from the time she was eighteen when their mother and father died horribly. This trauma grounds each of their lives, but for Olwen, there is also the terrible foreknowledge her field provides into the dark future that faces all of us: geologists know climate change is actually a disaster.

The youngest sister, Nell, is a struggling adjunct philosophy professor in the US with an unnamed physical illness rapidly destroying her body. Unable to feel her feet touching the ground, she can be seen as a complicated metaphor for our own disconnect from our physical selves and the planet. Her refusal to teach philosophy with a “universal appeal” (supporting the American success mythos), leaves her unable to achieve tenure and thus, without health insurance. Her occasional doses of philosophy position the novel as more than family drama but a “novel of ideas”—without ever being annoying.

When we first meet Maeve, she’s been hired to cater an upscale dinner party— replete with upper-class English characters who serve as foils for Maeve’s internal ethical struggles. She’s published a hugely successful cookbook focused on local foods—misinterpreted and embraced by isolationist Brits—but is struggling to finish her next project focused on food insecurity and the Brexit-driven economic downturn. Her publisher wants a mainstream cookbook, and her views on food position her in conflict with her upscale clients. As the novel spins out, we learn that she’s the peacemaker of the family, using food as a way to comfort and communicate with her sisters.

Rhona, perhaps the most complicated sister, has a charming toddler and is also a heavyweight political force—a tenured political science professor at Trinity College Dublin and a leading political consultant. Her politics may be confusing to a non-Irish reader, but her goal is to break stalemates between entrenched positions by advocating for “citizens’ assemblies”—bringing Democracy back to the people. Although she presents as coldly efficient and disconnected from her sisters, it’s Rhona who finds Olwen, which forces the sisters to face their past and the future. Her constant, direct interactions with her non-speaking toddler soften her character and illustrate her fierce love for family; her child is an easy bridge between the sisters.

While Rhona hopes for a quick visit and departure from Olwen’s chosen refuge, her electric car’s battery needs recharging (not easy to do in rural Ireland), and a severe storm keeps her longer than she’d like. The addition of an attractive local pub owner (who falls for Nell), adds to the drama while somewhat relieving the claustrophobic atmosphere of the farmhouse. Olwen retreats with a bottle to the barn (reminding her sisters of their father’s alcoholism), and Maeve attempts to cater an event at the local pub (no one shows up). As each sister participates in the trauma-informed dance of one step forward, a thousand steps in retreat, we ache for their failed connections - seeing in their failures our broader failure as a species to care enough for ourselves, each other, and our planet. It’s tempting to retreat with Olwen into the barn to wait out the end of the world.

But Maeve, Rhona, and Nell aren’t so easily given to failure. Nell stumbles on numb legs to a local lake for a night swim and instead of drowning, reaches out to the smitten pub owner—sometimes connection, however limited, is a better option. For Rhona, her child’s first words echo Nell’s Americanism “Hiya!” and we share in her confused joy. There is terrible darkness in this novel—Olwen’s ability to foresee our collective future in our planet’s geology is echoed in the terrifying (and perhaps unresolved) last scene. But there is also light: the first words of the next generation, the joy of finding connection with other people and the planet, and the ways we can heal together from even the deepest generational trauma to face the future together. This is a powerful and timely novel.