Ordinary Human Failings is a considerably more interesting book than it claims to be. It’s pitched as a procedural thriller of sorts – an unsolved murder, the cops closing in, an ambitious journalist snooping around. While there may be a depressing commercial logic to this framing, it does the novel scant justice; those plot elements amount to little more than a deftly handled framing device. Beyond lies a subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives. And it also happens to be an excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate. It’s considerably better than Nolan’s first novel, the acclaimed Acts of Desperation – worth stating, given our neophilic literary culture’s obsession with debuts and novelty.
Set mostly in the early 1990s, it tells the story of the Greens, a family of Irish immigrants who have moved to London in the hope of escaping the social stigma of daughter Carmel’s teenage pregnancy and her brother Ritchie’s escalating alcoholism. Judged reclusive and odd by their new neighbours, the Greens are easy scapegoats when tragedy visits their estate. As we gradually learn more about the psychological and structural forces that have shaped the family, a picture emerges of lives foreclosed; of youthful audacity hardening into resignation and resentment, fresh starts rendered heavy by old habit, sadnesses handed from parent to child like cursed heirlooms.
