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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Only the lonely: Academy Street by Mary Costello

20/12/2014

11 Comments

 
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What can I say to attract you to a novel that starts and ends with a funeral and mines a deep well of sadness in between? Academy Street is one of the most honest and heart-breaking accounts of fictional grief I’ve come across, as well as one of the most beautifully written.

Tess Lohan is marvelling at a blackbird that has flown in through the window to peck at the wallpaper in the family farmhouse as a coffin is carried downstairs. Seven-year-old Tess finds herself intermittently forgetting that her mother has died, that she won’t be able to run and tell her what she’s observed.

We stay with Tess over the next six decades as she follows her sister to boarding school, moves to Dublin to train as a nurse and then to New York to spend the bulk of her life on Academy Street until, echoing the opening chapters, she returns to her beloved Easterfield for the funeral of her elder brother. Tess finds moments of intense joy in the little things, but she’s often lonely: her deepest loves are ephemeral, her losses profound*. Like Dear Thief, Academy Street addresses the pain of attachments, whether it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

There’s a certain stoicism to Tess’s character: she does the best she can with the cards life has dealt her*, caring for others in the hospital and bringing up her son alone and, perhaps more poignantly, letting him go. One of the many pleasures for me, given my writerly scepticism about the necessity of character motivation, was also her ability to command the reader’s attention in the absence of much get-up-and-go (p141-2):

Occasionally she thought about retiring, moving house, taking a trip back to Ireland, but she did none of these things. There was, in her nature, a certain passivity, an acquiescence that was ill-suited to change or transformation, as if she feared ruffling fate or rousing to anger some capricious creature that lay sleeping at the bottom of her soul.

Although by no means written as a psychological case study, Tess’s character* was entirely convincing in this respect: women whose mothers died when they were children are particularly vulnerable in adulthood; those with unresolved issues around caring in childhood are often attracted to a career in the helping professions. Although Tess manages to rise above the shame of being an unmarried mother, the mixed blessings of her Catholic childhood also shaped the woman she would become.

Eschewing sentimentality, Mary Costello has managed to encapsulate almost the entire life of an ordinary woman in under 200 pages in a way that has the potential to resonate with us all. It’s an unusual format* for a novel and one that particularly interested me, given that one publisher turned down my novel Sugar and Snails on the basis that it read as “a fictional autobiography”, although I hadn’t seen it that way. Another thing that got me wondering* was the choice of title: while Tess spends the longest period of her life on Academy Street, I didn’t get a strong impression (nor did I miss not doing so) of the busy street life it had led me to expect, and her roots are back at Easterfield in rural Ireland.

This is an extremely impressive debut addressing the grief and loneliness from which no life is immune. Delightful in its use of language, it’s not an easy read emotionally, but nevertheless one I’d recommend. Thanks to Canongate Books for my review copy.

*These issues and other aspects of her writing process are explored in my Q&A with Mary Costello.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
11 Comments
sarah link
20/12/2014 01:44:50 pm

Wow. That is a wonderful review. I think you liked it. ;-) Thanks for sharing this. Sounds like a sad but beautiful read.

Reply
sarah
20/12/2014 01:45:51 pm

Meant to include how much I love the excerpt you chose.

Reply
Annecdotist
23/12/2014 09:41:59 am

Thanks, Sarah, and yes no beating about the bush with this one – I did like it.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
21/12/2014 04:26:35 am

Great review, Anne. I think it's a book I would like to read. I was particularly interested to read your comment about the issues of adults who lost their mothers in childhood, as my sister's children were 10, 8 and 6 when she passed away. Unfortunately for a variety of reasons contact with them has not been maintained and I fear the effect may be even more complex.
I agree with Sarah. I enjoyed the passage you have quoted. It seems very matter of fact but a lot is told in those few sentences.
I wonder how this publisher may have responded to Sugar and Snails.

Reply
Annecdotist
23/12/2014 09:45:58 am

Glad you liked the feel of this book, Norah. The research I linked to had a big impact, I think, when it was published in the 70s. Amazingly, there isn't a great deal of hard evidence – apart from this study – of adverse life events leading to depression, despite the fact that it makes good sense intuitively. Sadly there's more money around for drug research.

Reply
Clare O'Dea link
22/12/2014 07:45:29 am

By chance I have just started the book Anne. Already feel it will be over too quickly.

Reply
Annecdotist
23/12/2014 09:47:02 am

Ah, serendipity, hope you remember to come back and share a bit more of your thoughts when you've finished it.

Reply
Charli Mills
22/12/2014 05:15:33 pm

Great review that makes me curious to read the book. I'm interested in how the title sets up expectation but is the opposite. Perhaps that is indicative of the type of story this is?

Reply
Annecdotist
23/12/2014 09:49:12 am

Interesting perspective on the title, Charli. Don't know if you saw what the author said about it in her Q&A:
It was in the years spent in Academy Street when her son was small, that Tess probably came closest to happiness. During those years, that apartment was the locus – the vessel, the container – of love and hope.

Reply
Charli Mills
29/12/2014 07:11:45 pm

An interesting way to look at a place, but I understand it, too. Great year of reviews, Anne!

Annecdotist
30/12/2014 05:00:30 am

Thanks, Charli. I'm still wondering however, what kind of "Academy" there might have been on Academy Street, and whether there was a deeper meaning for the character. But I often end up looking for profundities in the wrong places!


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