Review by New York Times Review
GOD ALONE MIGHT'VE WRITTEN the Bible, but the Irish provided the punctuation. While the Roman Empire collapsed into the vernacular across the European continent, monks in the cold stone monasteries of that cold stone island hand-copied Latin and Greek versions of Scripture. Their "manuscripts" revived antiquity's systems of notation, resurrecting spaces between words and pauses between thoughts, and turned the Flesh of body text into the Word of divine revelation through the sacrament of quotation. The first thing God says to the first man, Adam, is, Don't pick the fruit from a certain tree. The second thing God says is that the man must have a partner, and so He puts Adam to sleep and removes a rib He turns into a woman: a half-formed thing, a dependent. "A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing" is the first novel by Eimear McBride, the latest in that illustrious line of Irish typographical reformers (born anno Domini 1976). Her book forgoes quotation marks and elides verbiage for sense, sound and sheer appearance on the page. For emphasis it occasionally wreaks havoc on capitals and reverses letter order. It is, in all respects, a heresy - which is to say, Lord above, it's a future classic. It helps, then, that its plot is among the oldest: childhood, or innocence and its loss. Genesis is narrated in an omniscient third person: Eve picks the fruit and is shamed. McBride opts for a first-person heroine-narrator who drinks, takes drugs and enjoys - but is traumatized by - sex. She's a lapsed Catholic, and always a cowed but dutiful daughter. She tells us all this - obliquely - and never says her name. But then "A Girl" begins before the name. The narrator speaks from the womb, as she's about to be delivered to a kind but careworn mother and an absentee father: "Thinking I think of you and me. Our empty spaces where fathers should be. Whenabouts we might find them and what we'd do to fill them up." The "you" being addressed is not the reader, as it might appear, but the narrator's brother, two or three years older, and afflicted with a brain tumor. If it's initially daunting to sift this prose for its relationships and even identities, it's because McBride insists that familial intimacy inheres linguistically too; this is how we all speak to our own loved ones, and about them to ourselves. "She was careful of you," the narrator says of her mother. "Saying let's take it slow. Mind your head dear heart. And her guts said Thank God. For her gasp of air. For this grant of Nurse I will. Learning you Our Fathers art. And when you slept I lulled in joyful mysteries glorious until I kingdom come. Mucus stogging up my nose. Scream to rupture day. Fatty snorting like a creature. A vinegar world I smelled. There now a girleen isn't she great. Bawling. Oh Ho. Now you're safe. But I saw less with these flesh eyes." After only a chapter or two, the style is justified, and the reader converted. In a fallen world of banshee winters, abuse, abandonment and neurosurgery, it's almost a sin of pride to care about grammar. By the time the narrator's father dies, life itself can seem like a McBride sentence: a maddened rush to the terminal without comma. Endings, finalities, periods, anything that impedes the flow of experience into thought, and of thought into speech: English usage imposes restraints, but then so does the Catholic Church, and even Dublin's River Liffey has dams to contend with. Throughout "A Girl," McBride opposes her narrator's unbridled fluency, which is her vitality, to the myriad forces - the family, nuns, priests and men, many men - that would arrest it into clauses, laws, rules and diagnoses, and it's this opposition that provides the cohering drama. This is why in a book in which the narrator struggles with her brother's decline, and with her rape by an uncle, the tragedy that would ultimately enfold them all is the adoption of conventional clarity: The unambiguous statement, or fact, is aligned with adulthood, and so with death. Of course, to be fully formed - to grow up - means to be tainted by this mode of communicating, as the narrator is in a catechism with her mother about their departure for another town: "It's time to go about our business. What's that? Moving house. Why? Because he bought this and I don't want it anymore. But I don't want to move Mammy. Don't start. But we've always lived here. We're. Moving. House. Because. That. Is. What. I'd. Like. To. Do. And. If. You. Don't. Too. Bad. Because. I'm. The. Mother." Later, the narrator will catechize herself, as she recovers an appetite for sex, or power: "Pimply faces white as never seen the light and crusty lips and dirty hands Just leave me alone. But he didn't answer. That voice already burning in what they don't know for all their talk. What am I? God. Is that right. How would that be? But there's some bit feels savage. That doesn't know the wrong from right and sees the way to venge. I might. I am. I will." THE NARRATOR, APPROACHING her late teens, decides to leave alone for the city, and so becomes briefly legible, if only because she hasn't brought along her "you." On her visits home, she regains him, her brother in his failing health and pronoun, but the accounts she gives of her independence - of an independence he'll never have - are now notably internalized, unspoken: "I met a man. I met a man. I let him throw me round the bed. And smoked, me, spliffs and choked my neck until I said I was dead. I met a man who took me for walks. Long ones in the country. I offer up. I offer up in the hedge. I met a man I met with her. She and me and his friend to bars at night and drink champagne and bought me chips at every teatime." McBride herself, at 17, moved to London to study acting at the Drama Centre, wrote this novel a decade later and spent nearly another decade trying to publish it. She succeeded only last year, in Britain. "A Girl" won a bundle of prizes, and the inevitable comparisons to the Irish tradition - Beckett's monologues, Joyce's Molly Bloom soliloquy in "Ulysses" and the ontogenetic prose of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" - and to the Irish/British female avants: Edna O'Brien, Virginia Woolf, Ann Quin, Christine Brooke-Rose. What all that praise had in common, besides that it was deserved, was the sad sense that the English-language novel had matured from modernism, and that in maturing its spirit was lost: It was now gray, shaky, timid, compromised by publicity and money, the realisms of survival. McBride's book was a shock to that sentiment, not least because it is about that sentiment. "A Girl" subjects the outer language the world expects of us to the inner syntaxes that are natural to our minds, and in doing so refuses to equate universal experience with universal expression - a false religion that has oppressed most contemporary literature, and most contemporary souls. 'Thinking I think of you and me. Our empty spaces where fathers should be.' JOSHUA COHEN'S next novel, "Book of Numbers," will be published in 2015.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 28, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Growing up in a poor backwater town in Ireland, the narrator of McBride's powerful debut novel, dark horse winner of the Baileys Women's Prize, was closely attached to her older brother, both of them in league against their volatile mother. Shortly before the narrator's birth, however, an invasive tumor had been removed from her brother's brain, causing him to be developmentally "slow" and leaving him with a livid scar on his head and a prominent limp. The prose is permeated with imagery that convey the squalid conditions of their existence. Their father has flown, and their mother alternates between obsessive prayer and screaming rants threatening hell for impiety. The narration is written in a Joycean stream of consciousness with an Irish lilt, and sentence fragments transmit the pervasive sense of urgency, of thoughts spinning faster than the tongue can speak. When she is 13, the narrator is raped by her uncle, and the relationship continues after the narrator leaves home for college in the city. By this point she recognizes the dark streak in her nature that treats sex as punishment. She welcomes her uncle's continuing predation, which fuels her promiscuity. Her voice reaches to an anguished pitch when her brother's tumor returns; she feels guilt at having left him to cope with her mother's religious mania. Some readers may be turned off at this point, depressed by the deathbed vigil or the narrator's inevitable breakdown, but those who persevere will have read an unforgettable novel. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The heroine of McBride's remarkable debut novel, winner of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, is angry, flippant, rebellious, tender, promiscuous, hungry, risk-embracing, lonely, confused, desperate, caring, and wholly unsupported by those around her. She's every young woman trying to find herself in an unwelcoming world and very specifically a sister contending with a brain-damaged brother, particularly difficult because she is younger, unable to protect him, and flooded by the fallout-a situation too little explored in literature. But as the narrative makes clear, her anguish is multiplied by the classic visitation of brutality and small-mindedness from grandfather to daughter to granddaughter, and one begins to understand why this girl (like so many others) is half-formed. And about that narrative: one often reads that a novelist's style is unique, but this is the rare case when that's actually true. The language moves in fits and starts, with incomplete sentences and stuttering phrases that capture the narrator's inner turmoil, her never being able quite to articulate what she's thinking or feeling (because who's listening?): "You said it is like nothing at all. It must be something what? And words, trace stammer of." Throughout, she addresses her brother in the second person, ever trying to connect; over-the-top behavior and brutal sex are means not of losing herself but of feeling herself there. Verdict This book will confound readers who like their text traditional, but it's addictive and flowing and works perfectly to capture a heroine whose voice we need to hear.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fresh, emotionally raw debut fromIrish-born, U.K.-based author McBride.Written in halting sentences,half-sentences and dangling clauses that tumble through the text like fleeting,undigested thoughts, the story follows the female narrator as she navigates anabusive upbringingphysical, sexual and psychologicaland the lingering effectsof her brother's early childhood brain trauma. McBride opens with the youngnarrator in the hospital with her mother and brother, who is undergoing surgery("You white-faced feel the needle go in. Feel fat juicy poison poison young boyskin. In your arteries. Eyeballs. Spine hands legs. Puke it cells up all daylong. No Mammy don't let them"). From there, the author follows her protagonistthrough her confused, angry adolescence, which is exacerbated by her mother'spiercing Irish-Catholic piety, and examines her struggle between appeasing herfamily and developing her own identity. Though the structure and events areroughly chronological and conventionalchildhood; adolescence andexperimentation with sex, drugs and alcohol; further confusing and liberatingexperiences in college; the deaths of loved onesthe style is anything but.McBride calls to mind both Joyce and Stein in her syntax and mechanics, but shebrings her own emotional range to the table, as well. As readers, we burrowdeep within the narrator's brain as she battles to mature into a well-balancedadult amid her chaotic surroundings. In an uncomfortable but always eye-openingtale, McBride investigates the tensions among family, love, sex and religion.Lovers of straightforward storytelling will shirk, but open-minded readers(specifically those not put off by the unusual language structure) will besurprised, moved and awed by this original novel.McBride's debut garnered theinaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the Baileys Women's Prize for fiction in2014and deservedly so. This is exhilarating fiction from a voice to watch. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
