If, post-Sally Rooney, it’s the job of the young female novelist to take the pulse of a generation, the diagnosis so far is worrying. In a burning world where job security and home ownership are a laughable dream, what’s left is a fixation on emotional life; the chase for romance, however fleeting. At its most basic, we’re left with a “does she get the guy?” narrative arc, without Rooney’s problematising acuity.
Newcomer Rachel Connolly strikes the by now familiar tone of confusion and melancholy, but with a piercing penetration and observational clarity. Belfast, if not a lazy city, is certainly a wary, “post-conflict” one. Erin, the narrator, considers what it means to hail from there: “It’s not like I can compare it with growing up anywhere else.” Her interlocutor is a lonely American academic with scarily perfect teeth whom she meets in a bar. Matt is a handy plot device in that Erin can use him to explain her own feelings about her birthplace during their awkward cultural interchanges. The Troubles is the great unspoken: “[People] don’t talk about it … they barely talk about anything else either.”
