Review of Latest Irish and Irish-American Books

Recommended

Deirdre Madden’s new novel Molly Fox’s Birthday is the story of a complicated friendship between three unique individuals: lauded Irish actor Molly Fox, who is away working in New York and London; Belfast-born art critic and television personality Andrew; and the unnamed narrator, a well-established female playwright who is struggling with a new work while staying in Molly’s Dublin home. The paperback spans in time only a single midsummer’s day, cut through with the narrator’s recollections of other moments in the history of her friendships with Andrew and Molly. But rather than coming off as stylistically ambitious, the one-day structure feels understated and yet wholly satisfying.

The intimacy of inhabiting Molly’s house, staying among her things, runs parallel to Molly’s career, as an actor, of inhabiting other characters’ selves. Molly’s house is filled with precious belongings, as distinctive as Molly herself, which makes Molly’s lack of emotional attachment to these material possessions all the more curious and reflective of a deeper detachment that affects all of her relationships.

Each of the three main characters has a brother who serves as a foil and a tie back to pasts that each has tried to escape in order to reinvent themselves. The narrator’s brother is Tom, a Catholic priest who instilled in her a love of language that offered a world outside of their upbringing in a large farming family who “all lived in each other’s pockets” in a remote Northern Ireland town. Molly’s unstable brother Fergus tells a version of their childhood with the mother Molly villanizes that is quite different from Molly’s. But most poignant of all is Andrew’s relationship with his brother Billy, the favorite of his parents who was killed during the Troubles as a loyalist paramilitary.

This is a book about superstition and faith, about acting and pretending, about keeping secrets and telling stories. There is something wonderfully contained about its narrative, but there are infinitesimal details to savor on every page while the novel’s philosophical scope is wide. “Friendship is far more tragic than love,” thinks the narrator. “It lasts longer.”

Deirdre Madden, from Toomebridge, Co. Antrim, teaches at Trinity College Dublin and is the author of eight other novels. She has won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Hennessy Award. Molly Fox’s Birthday was a finalist for the Orange Prize.          

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