May 24, 2024
Ordinary Human Failings, by Megan Nolan
Are Irish writers having a moment, beyond Sally Rooney and Tana French, even? (And Claire Keegan, and Louise Kennedy, and Caroline O’Donoghue.) Here’s another, Megan Nolan, whose second book is Ordinary Human Failings, a novel that’s agonizing exquisite, beginning with the death of a toddler on a London housing estate in 1990, all local gossip pointing toward a semi-feral 10-year-old as the killer, the second child belonging to an Irish family that’s never really seemed right, particularly since the death of the mother, Rose, leaving behind her husband, John, disabled by a workplace accident; eldest son Richie, a drunk; daughter Carmel, beautiful and hardened; and Carmel’s daughter, Lucy, neglected and wild. All the pieces fitting into place, or at least that’s how it seems from the perspective of newspaper reporter Tom Hargreaves, young and striving, hoping to land that big scoop that’s going to take him somewhere far from here. He ends up with the family and uses whatever tools he has on hand to get them to hand him their misery, share the pitiful story of how they all ended up like this, but he’s not as savvy as he seems, which is to say that he just doesn’t get it (in both senses) and Nolan shows each family member’s most vulnerable and private selves, the tender bits that nobody else has ever witnessed before, and that nobody like Tom will be able to exploit. Nolan renders these people as tragically, achingly human, their stories only ordinary ones, so the title goes, but this novel itself is quietly magnificent.
