Living can be a heavy business. No Small Thing, the debut novel by Orlaine McDonald, concerns itself with the accretive weight of thwarted desires, familial responsibilities and the relentless, life‑dominating grind of poorly paid labour. Slim and episodic, the novel tracks a year in the life of a south London family – grandmother Livia, daughter Mickey and granddaughter Summer – as they haltingly attempt to care for one another against a background of abandonment and resentment. Also present, in the broadest sense, is Meriem, the disembodied voice of Livia’s own mother, offering gnomic wisdom and serving as a reminder that since we tend to carry our dead with us, we may as well listen to them while we are at it.
Livia, by some distance the most compelling and well-drawn of the three principal characters, is a revelation. We meet her in middle age, body made taut by her rigorous routine of exercise, mind made quiet by her rigorous exercise of routine. She initially presents as brittle and cold, but a series of flashbacks eventually reveal Livia’s affect to be a type of armour, heaved on in the hope it might protect her from the pain that can so often follow in the wake of love. Rather than static and impassive, Livia is a coiled spring, roiling with desires and frustrations, with the fury of having to live a life too often defined by its limitations. McDonald renders Livia with a huge amount of empathy, but also with a rare moral boldness, allowing her to be equivocal and complex at every turn. This is never more apparent than when we see a younger Livia repeatedly struggle with the suffocating obligations and tedium of motherhood, at one point recoiling at her daughter’s “pubescent scent”. A writer more concerned with publishing’s fetish for likable protagonists would probably stop some way short of where McDonald allows Livia to go.
In Mickey we see the long, distorting shadows cast by abandonment. She faces the perennial choice of every adult whose childhood was shaped by neglect; commit yourself to living alongside your wounds, with forgiveness and grace, or spend the rest of your life letting them distort you. Sadly for Mickey (and for the rest of us) there is no secret third option in which the wounds can be sublimated until they disappear. Deferring the choice, Mickey seeks a simulacrum of freedom in the form of hedonism, her compulsive consumption slowly isolating her from the very connection she so desperately craves. In the midst of this, with heartbreaking inevitability, Mickey reproduces many of the same cruelties that she feels were inflicted on her, leaving Summer to scratch out a life starved of affection, as she seeks the thin gruel of attention using whatever means she has available to her.
There is a plainspoken verisimilitude to McDonald’s writing, ensuring No Small Thing never lapses into sentimentality, earning every bit of its considerable pathos. That said, over the course of an entire novel, it’s an approach that can occasionally feel stolid, leaving the reader hoping McDonald might reach for a more daring or poetic turn of phrase, let a bit of music in. There are some structural niggles, too; the character of Earl, for example, feels forced and instrumental. Slightly two-dimensional, he is less a character and more an expositor, not least when he is making clunkily explicit the rich seam of diasporic political Blackness that McDonald elsewhere handles with an impressively subtle and embodied deftness.
Preferences of style aside, No Small Thing is an accomplished novel, suffused with the unmistakable air of proximity. One gets the sense that McDonald truly knows these characters, knows their worlds, their habits and idiosyncrasies, their failings and pathologies – it all rings consistently true. In a neophile publishing landscape forever seeking the startling and the original, there is a certain irony to be had here. In its unshowy depiction of parenting, of the tension between desire and sacrifice, between freedom and care, McDonald has ended up writing a novel that, in its very attention to the ordinary, is among the most unusual and refreshing debuts I have read this year.
• No Small Thing by Orlaine McDonald is published by Serpent’s Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
