“We use the word breakdown for both mechanical objects and humans,” writes Irish author Cathy Sweeney in Breakdown, the follow-up to her acclaimed short story collection Modern Times. This debut novel tells the tale of many different breakdowns: the breakdown of friendship, of trust, of society’s expectations of wives and mothers; of the prejudice of an older Irish generation, of hopes, of a marriage and – ultimately – of a human mind.
Our narrator is a 52-year-old Dublin teacher, a seemingly happy middle-class woman who wakes one winter’s morning to the “slow metronome snoring” of her husband, Tom, a man who rests easy knowing his Apple watch will tell him every night that he’s reached his daily goals. She begins another routine day. However, on the way to work, and on the spur of the moment, she decides to turn left at a set of traffic lights, and in doing so drives away from Tom, his snoring and her two teenage children, abandoning the life she has always lived and heading straight into the unknown. We follow her as she finds herself in service stations, wanders aimlessly around shopping centres and acquires an impromptu haircut, swapping her clothes in the changing rooms of a retail outlet for ones she feels are more suited to what lies ahead. She has no idea what that is and asks herself if this is what she really craves: “an expanse of nothing opening up where a future should be”.
