“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”.
Chased by texts and WhatsApp messages, which begin with demands about soya milk and rugby kits but eventually transition into anger and accusations, the woman takes the train to Rosslare and a boat across the Irish Sea, recreating a journey she made decades earlier. Finally, 48 hours after leaving home, she reaches Wales and an isolated cottage, where she explores her past, searching for both understanding and deliverance.
There are many stories of people who walk away from their lives, but Breakdown does not reflect the gentle charm of Harold Fry or the caustic wit of Reggie Perrin. Nor does it deal with a woman on the run, seen most recently in Louise Doughty’s espionage thriller A Bird in Winter. This is a story of reawakening and self-compassion, and, thanks to the skill of Sweeney’s writing, it manages to be both poignant and brutal, reassuring and disturbing, taking the reader on a wise and perceptive journey through the expectations placed on women via marriage and motherhood, and the sacrifices made to meet those expectations. “I was afraid, not of failing, but of being seen to fail,” explains our narrator. We are told that in Japan, so many people disappear that there is a word for them: johastu – evaporated people. However, our narrator does not evaporate. She becomes solid and strong, re-emerging perhaps as the person she was always meant to be.
In a novel about identity, where the layers of assumptions and misconceptions are slowly peeled away to reveal a long-lost sense of self, we never learn our main character’s name. She remains anonymous and yet familiar. “Maybe you think you know her,” Sweeney writes in the opening pages. “Or you know her type.” Perhaps that’s the cleverest thing of all in this sharp and timely story. It could be any one of us.
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