When discussing Eimear McBride’s new novel The City Changes Its Face, we could start with the Jonathan Franzen/Ben Marcus tete-a-tete that occurred two decades ago, when the “make it accessible,” bestselling, bird-loving Time coverboy argued against novels overpraised for their “difficulty” in The New Yorker (“Mr. Difficult,” 09/30/02), eliciting a response in Harper’s (“Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It,” Oct. ‘05) from the lesser known but intellectually rigorous standard bearer of the avantgarde, the weird, the literature of the mind, a.k.a.: “experimental fiction.” Synopsis for those averse to lit debates of yore: Franzen (midwestern Protestant, Swarthmore class of ’81, divorced, non-breeder, Caucasian, glasses, good hair, summers in NoCal) waving his flag for Dickens/Bellow/Beattie and their establishment inheritors vs. Marcus (Texan Jewish-Catholic, multiply Ivy’d, spouse of Heidi Julavits, father of two, Caucasian, glasses, no hair, summers in Maine) touting the postmodernist likes of Gass/Gaddis/Pynchon and their big-tome outsiders’ books. The former crew leads with the page-turning and the lapidary while the latter froths out the fomentings of their for-real-genius-madpeople minds but can induce “Hey, this prose looks different than I’m used to!” complaints or provide occasions for celebratory highbrow joy. I see validity in both camps and hope to offer an objective observation when confronted with the word formulations festooned throughout the works of one of the Marcus mavens’ most prominent inheritors, Irish author and very-back-end-of-Gen-X’er, Eimear McBride, ever since her big-splash: award-winning debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing in 2013.
Or we could start with McBride’s Hibernian antipode, the uber-accessible, glassy smooth, quotation-mark-eschewing works of lit-world T-Swift, Marxist lass de jour, Team Franzen member/massive-sales achiever, Ms. Sally Rooney, where the sex be volatile but less thoroughly rancid than the more Lynchian moments that define McBride’s scathing-‘n’-scabrous debut. Part of my concern with Eimear’s works since A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is that the shake-you-to-your-core Lynchian-ness is largely absent. There’s a quieter and more abstemious vibe that aims for Lynne Ramsay but falls a smidge short. Cinema is no captious locale when discussing McBride because, despite my reservations about the execution of this novel in particular and the arc of her oeuvre as a whole, the juiciest wedge of The City Changes Its Face is a 78-page segment (of a 327-page novel) written in screenplay format.
Let’s stick with sentence-maven Sally for a sec, though. On the centennial of Ulysses, The Roon kicked off a piece in The Paris Review on Joyce, a scribe impossible to ignore in this conversation, by quoting T.S. Eliot’s: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found.” Meanwhile, Tom McCarthy’s (author of Remainder, C, Satin Island, and postulated as poster boy for the pro-“challenging works” position by Sadie Smith and her self-appointed Zed in “Two Paths for the Novel” in NYRB in 2008; Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland was Dame Z’s exemplar of the more conventional side) “Why Ulysses Matters” from 2017 essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish, estimates Joyce’s corpus as epoch-ender, the farthest pole of modernist success (and excess), language pushed to and past its breaking point. Reading The City Changes Its Face, perhaps my most damning critique is simply that I don’t think McBride has pushed her form any further than where it started in A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Come to think of it, said form is not all that Joycean; rather, it’s self-consciously nontraditional, which is Franzen’s point about works of literature praised for their difficulty—they are choresome and pompous, straining (in a way now summed up as “tryhard”) for sophistication, and overglossed with erudition. Nor do I find in The City Changes Its Face Eliot’s important expression of the present age. If anything, I see what I’ll dub grime nostalgia, a person hitting middle age reminiscing about the bygone overindulgent I-almost-died-whilst-staring-down-the-abyss partydom days (and far more often nights) back in their drugs-and-self-destruction period, their, erm, angst-riddled youth.
Now, the essay about the phenom who never outperforms their rookie season is an elegiac one, and some might say it’s unfair to look for the leaps Joyce took in the eight-year span that encompassed the publication of Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses to be repeated by a contemporary author just because they hail from similar shores, but I’m a barely-eligible Generation X’er myself, so I fall on the skeptical side, while remaining wary of the guardrails that separate skepticism from cynicism, and I’ve “gotta be honest” and “keep it real” and say that my “gut” (“hot takes” are a newer generation’s version) on Eimear’s subsequent works is that they read like someone got famous and acclaimed, through the timeworn admixture of talent and luck, and henceforth everything she pens gets published tout de suite. “Diminishing returns” isn’t some meanspirited slight, it’s how it goes sometimes in the arts (or sports, or business; where not every Rookie of the Year goes on to win an MVP and not every season’s top earner eventually becomes CEO). Fashion your own comparison for, well, fashion, or law, or education. Or “prestige TV,” where acclaimed-but-not-quite-top-tier fare from Dexter to Masters of Sex and Boardwalk Empire to The Handmaid’s Tale exhibit this phenomenon. They aren’t bad shows, per se, they’re just not Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire, and The Sopranos. Or Twin Peaks, The Decalogue, Out 1, and Berlin Alexanderplatz, to include a Mount Rushmore from that Marcus/McCarthy/McBride side of the debate.
A more forgiving starting point is Eve Babitz, curvaceous sexual dynamo (also russet-haired like Eimear) constantly contrasted with willowy, frangible Joan Didion in 2024’s socialite-feted Babitz/Didion by Lili Anolik. Eve’s trademark voraciousness and veracity (and latter-day hoarder zaniness) furnish a stateside IRL permutation of a McBridean protagonist—like the Babitz of 1977’s Slow Days, Fast Company, Eimear’s self-modeled protagonist Eily is a bombshell-physique’d sharp cookie desperately in love with a handsome but emotionally distant Irishman. And the combo of gritty po’-white-folks sex & violence told from a distinctly femme POV is also better—or at least more thoroughly advancing in style, intuition, and complexity across the parabola of her works—imbued in McBride’s predecessor Edna O’Brien, unblinking matriarch of twentieth-century Irish letters, whose sexual politics are served by a well-hewn old-school prose that can be jarringly frank, but isn’t so “sweaty.”
McBride’s font fuckery and wonky-spaced lines can move past diminishing returns to downright irritating. And both Babitz and O’Brien were first-wavers, kin to William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings, to Sontag (or Kael) and Adler (or Thomson), so the primary question becomes: is it fair to criticize McBride just for being late to the party and not evolving significantly past the undeniable aptitude exhibited in her Published Novel #1?
With The City Changes Its Face, the jagged-but-poetic prose style still stands out by dint of merit. It’s worthwhile, fun to read at times, and I’d go so far as to say “distinctive,” if there’s one plaudit to unreservedly foist her way. Particularly so since the publishing apparatus these days privileges safe, predictable, mass-market nonliterature or barely literary political screeds. There burble up rather regularly very-online book debates on the “socials” and Substacks about who’s to blame and who’s being persecuted, and “why do the books all seem the same,” and who’s blurbing or not blurbing whom, and why do the awards feel like constituency plums, and who’s trying to get clicks by boycotting the ceremony in support of a cause célèbre, and who’s stumping (or stamping, toddlerishly) their outrage by calling for “divestiture” or “solidarity” with cause X or issue Y or hashtag Z or social movement Q4, as they reduce literature to the equivalent of a “Kindness lives in this home!” liberal lawn sign or its concomitant reactionary conservative banner “Apolitical aesthetics alone will be our criteria over here!”
If homogeny and groupthink are a lit lover’s enemies then McBride’s offerings are “allies,” if sometimes woe-is-me “victim narratives.” They aren’t self-congratulatory “confessional” novels, and they read as literary, if literary means: requiring a close and undistracted read. Just following along with the verse-like prose, the herky-jerky time jumps, and the unattributed dialogue is the opposite of Netflix movies designed to play in the background (see Will Tavlin’s “Casual Viewing: Why Netflix looks like that” from the Winter 2025 issue of n+1 for a takedown of that noxious and anti-intellectual modern-day practice) so credit McBride on this front in the culture wars.
But I’m a child of the 1980s whose high school and college years were spent entirely in the 1990s, and so that’s where I’ll zero in. McBride’s books post-A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing are ‘90s-situated but haven’t much perforated the zeitgeist here in the ‘20s (part deux!), their nineties-ness doesn’t much matter, and neither do their titles, as this new one spends very little time describing the city of London. Also, a follow-up to your “sensation” called The Lesser Bohemians (2016, the book to which The City Changes Its Face is a pseudo-sequel) had to have someone in a publishing house worried that it could magnetize reviewers too easily to the peg of “sophomore slump,” call their mind to hippie-dippy Edie Brickell songs, or tickle the idea that the book’s sexual sturm und drang might be a little undercooked. The quasi-Joycean wordgames don’t do much different than they did in the prior, better book; McBride’s text gaps, miniaturized fonts, and “stream-of-preconsciousness” (her own denotation) lose their sheen quickly and cross the rubicon from “experimental” to “gimmicky.”
Or maybe McBride’s subsequent brainchildren just aren’t as intellectually enthralling as Helen DeWitt’s or Nell Zink’s, nor as compact and efficient as Claire Keegan’s and Claire-Louise Bennett’s, and maybe Eimear just had an aggressively Irish name and was a “nice story” (in mere months, she catapulted from tiny Coffeehouse Press and a few attendant discussions about marginalized voices echoing the ghosts of Eir past to full-blown Literary SuperstarTM), and now she’s just another (sorry, not sorry) white-lady midlister.
2025’s lit discourse has pondered whether the big 1990s novels are overrated. I reread The Corrections about a year ago and it holds up for me, but did Michael Chabon really need all those pages (I reread Kavalier & Clay right around the same time and their extensive adventures didn’t fare as well) to be a longhaired Provincetown Workshop litbro? Wasn’t he destined to write better but narrower (and shorter) nonfiction books about hipster fatherhood? The apex of early 2000s quirk-quotient fictions are being called into question at Slate where Dana Stevens weighs in with “Karen Russell’s novel The Antidote demonstrates the limits of wunderkind fiction” and interrogates the already-datedness of Swamplandia! while Dan Kois reexamines Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Brainy writers like Marcus have their acolytes but don’t get a lot of press; they mostly publish with Dalkey or Dzanc or Graywolf and make their living teaching. Franzen is still handwringed over, as is Chabon when he runs afoul of the cancel-culture crowd. Same for Benioff & Weiss and Ryan Adams and Win Butler from Arcade Fire and Alexander Payne and PT Anderson and Louis CK and JK Rowling and every artist with initials who’s ever been dubbed “problematic.”
Is McBride then just a not-so-edgy-after-all one-hit wonder? The Lesser Bohemians was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize but its rep is so-so. 2020’s Strange Hotel emanates the most dashed-off feel of her volumes and has been widely lambasted by critics. The 2022 small-press nonfiction treatise Something Out of Place: Women & Disgust establishes her second-wave feminist bonafides, but the viewpoint’s rather staid (The Patriarchy still exists and it’s as noxious as ever! Hilary Clinton lost because sexism! Your rockist hero Lester Bangs was a hateful misogynist who said degrading things about Debbie Harry!) and it’s basically a writ-small distillation of Dworkin, Brownmiller, Mulvey, and Cixous. When Kathy Acker and Dennis Cooper said “Fuck the Man!” in their uncompromised art from the fringes in the ‘80s/‘90s, they radiated an undeniable radicalism; it was (fucking) apparent and it was (motherfucking) sustained. Meanwhile, I’m not sure McBride’s I-abjure-your-made-up-daddy-rules isn’t a pose, an autopilot gesture instead of an innovating one, the equivalent of rejecting the cheerleaders and normie girls via purple lipstick, green hair, proudly flaunted cellulite, Bratmobile lunchboxes, and punk-rock-pinned backpacks. When worn in the 1990s, the Ani DiFranco/Kathleen Hanna/Carrie Brownstein/Kim Gordon aesthetic had teeth—even though they’ve all published unreadably self-involved and flat-prosed memoirs on Big 5 imprints; I guess Kim Deal and Georgia Hubley have held out, and I hope they maintain that position. Lest I seem unfair to the indie-rock matriarchs, the print spent overanalyzing Dylan’s Chronicles Volume 1 and Springsteen’s Born to Run (the book) vexes as well, and this reader can’t let the POC contingent off either; I’m looking at you, Questlove’s Music is History and Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart—but those same signifiers read as a little stale or as cosplay if worn nowadays.
In terms of apportioning thumbs-up emojis, the verse-prose in McBride’s new one is lilting, frolicsome, and the mostly-first-person-but-not-always free-indirect style conjures up “spareliest whims” and “plastical chimes” aplenty whilst her protagonist awakes from a dream into “the blueish early” and later has a “landline epiphany.” The novel’s subjectivity, while not radical, is refreshing, a piquant presentation of the objectivity-is-a-canard POV, with “canard” a Beckett word, and he oft-mentioned as apical influencer for Irish writers. Anne Enright’s hyperbolic back-cover blurb for The City Changes Its Face deems McBride the “natural heir” of Joyce and Beckett, both of whom fall on the hard-is-good side of the debate, with Marcus himself averring that their “language is complex because it is seeking to accomplish something extraordinarily difficult: to engrave the elusive aspects of life’s entanglements, to represent the intensity of consciousness, to produce the sort of stories that transfix and mesmerize.” There’s only so much you can do with such a simple form; this was Marcus’s takehome, his bottomline—Why are you so Team Hot Dog, JFranz? he essentially argued, wieners or fish & chips are fine as comfort food, but come on already, they’re not big-time literature, they’re not transfixing meals.
Such vittles are consumed by McBride’s working-class characters in The City Changes Its Face, though, and frankly that’s her appeal to the literati: this streelish girl and her avatars give the snoots a taste of the gutter and yet she doesn’t write like a dumbed-down hoi polloi, an effete plebe, or a YAF-ite. Like Babitz, she’s a voluptuary of the word. For me, though, a gourmand of grit-lit from Genet, Bataille, and Burroughs to Last Exit to Brooklyn, Less Than Zero, and Eileen, the squalor in McBride can get a bit too recurrent, prolix, and recidivist; how many times can we hear about addicts sprawled out on the “lino”—the single most irritatingly overused word in her body of work—or read yet another descrip of (protagonist Eily’s fella) Stephen’s skinniness, especially that of his torso and fingers, as unrelentingly described both here and in The Lesser Bohemians?
Since The City Changes Its Face came out earlier this year across the pond, there’s already been the prescribed (pre-approved? curdled?) passel of publicist-meets-critical-apparatus approval: “Through her terse, propulsive prose, McBride has translated this truth into style – but without sacrificing emotional rigour,” and “It’s a rare feat to encounter a writer whose work feels both entirely original and timeless, but Eimear McBride is just that. The story goes that, while writing her debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, she taped a James Joyce quote above her desk.” OK, I relent, British press, but what of the story?
We open this semi-sequel to The Lesser Bohemians with a more abject foregrounding of Eily and Stephen, late-teen protagonist and her two-decades-older boyfriend who has a daughter (named Grace) right around her age. We’re in the druggy squats of Trainspotting time, Brit Pop metastasizing, anarchism and EDM still uncolonized, or at least not totally blown-out and #corporatesuck, and yes, I admit, the prose is brassy and Babitzy and muscular. We’re in The Pre-Internet Times, folks! Cinema is still the lingua franca! By page 26 we get references to Kafka and Sarah Kane to indicate a self-awareness, a layering, an author-narrator-character triad ripe for literary analysis. The street cred doesn’t flag; Eil early on calls Stephen a “fuckup” and their relationship’s energy legit bursts off the page even if the setting is smackdab center-cut Age of Irony.
These are weirdoes with what is now dubbed an “age-gap relationship,” but they’re good weirdoes. Stephen used to be a junky but he’s clean now and he’s reconnecting with his daughter and “processing” his “traumatic” past through his art. In the earlier novel he was an actor but now he’s moving behind the camera. Most of all he’s “doing the work,” to use the parlance of the therapy-worshipping present. Admission: I stand with Nabokov and Lynch and Herzog in my stance that psychotherapy is largely an anti-art capitalist trick/new-age religion proliferating narcissism and selling you back to you. The particular psychological rankness on display this time around is Stephen’s physically and sexually abusive mother, but these scenes are handled without much direct description. Again, the Lynchian depths of viscerality are far more muted; in McBride’s debut they howled, but here the screams are offstage and more alluded to than incarnated.
My guess is some will see it as wallowing in miserabilism while others will detect a hint of Larry Clark’s photography (though not as unflinching) or Alejandro González Iñárritu’s films (though not as showy/likely to be esteemed for possessing “brio”) or a feminist rebranding of the more squalid manifestations in Mamet and O’Neill (both playwrights are namedropped in this novel). McBride navigates rather fluidly shifts into second-person and third-person, which isn’t easy, and to clarify my own stance a la ListHub’s, erm, LitHub’s BookMarks, this is a “mixed,” not a “pan.” Let’s exculpate and excavate with tangible evidence. Early on, we segue from a section with a “First Summer” subheading to one with a “Now” subheading thusly:
Jammed tight in with the here of it then, I took the bait of your smile. And smiled it back. And, for want of interest in causing other wrecks, went to the window to look. Day. Another. London city and world. There before me as you were. I still see you as I saw you and long to be you, as I was you, all the way over again.
Going by his side, I flick through that time and wonder how remembering it’s doing in him? Very active or not? Either way those eyes just keep drifting books, as he sips at his beer, and thinks in himself of things I can’t quite guess.
Observably good prose blooms in McBride’s garden and it’s not so much that weeds crop up, it’s that the garden is over-coiffed and too-tended, not nearly as enrapturing as Kane, Lynch, Acker, Cooper, Mamet, and O’Neill at their best. In these “First Summer” sections, Eil’s eighteen, Grace is seventeen, and Stephen’s more than twice his loverlady’s age and hasn’t seen his daughter in twelve years, though they reunite soon after and eventually Grace asks about her grandmother and how her father Stephen endured her abuse. Eil is competitive with Grace and possessive of Stephen. She comes across as insecure, afraid of infiltration and oust.
There’s courage in these depictions and the Mike Leigh vibes were starting to do their working-class whirl about this reader’s mind, but I was also wondering whether the narrative was too melodramatic, particularly when Eil’s trying to figure out if she’s preggers or not—the sentences are solid, though, evocative: “Crying in the corner. Banging my head on the bath. Thinking of all undoings, here was the worst. Forewarned since forever and yet what have you done? Faithless body pursuing its luck in spite of in spite of everything I knew. Despite, on those nights, knowing too there lived, inside, a sliver of risk. Took it anyway and now this.” Real feels there, Eim. In her not-quite-autofictiony character Eil, there’s some suicidal ideation and a scent of Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun, but one of that film’s strengths is its delicate use of the child’s point of view, so I’m not sure the comparisons favor McBride, as I found myself thinking that Grace would’ve been a better audience-surrogate character to inhabit instead of another round with Eily.
As for the “city’s face,” it was different in the 1990s than today, sure. 1996 London, like many world cities, was less gentrified during those immediately pre-Blair years. And even less gentrified than that in the pre-Thatcher years (watch The Long Good Friday or read Elizabeth Young’s Pandora’s Handbag), but this is a character study about survivors, one male and one female; that’s the work’s real genre, survivorship narrative. The setting, both time and place, are given pretty short shrift. To continue to microscope the form, Grace is Stephen’s “legacy,” Eil says, in prose centered on page and in a mode of The Serious—all very weighted, freighted, and marinated in gravitas:
Stephen? Stephen, you don’t have to be afraid.
And then we’re switching from “First Winter” back to “Now” with the following, to give a proper snapshot of the visuals of the thing:
First Winter
Nothing at first. Then, in your back, some relent, if I chose to read it that way. I chose to read it like that. Pressed my lips to it too and heard you breathe out. Soft like sadness into the room. Then reaching back through the mess, your long fingers found mine. Drew them around and kept them close to your chest. So a repeat of last night except somehow we were even further off. More embodied. Becoming built of alternative stuff – the instinct for comfort rather than for us to lock every other world out. So there we both were, staring at the wall. One at least, me, hazarding at the direction of travel. The other, you, hobbled by the past’s thwart of your now, and not much help at all.
Now
Pointing out Grace will be here when his show closes is scarcely news. But new is his pretending her presence comes with no past.
So what if Grace is here?
Stephen, it’s not exactly private then.
Fine. So another time.
Another and another.
Your point being?
‘I’m preparing.’ ‘I’m rehearsing.’ ‘The show’s about to go up.’ ‘It’s the first night.’ ‘I’ve got a matinee.’ ‘Eily, I’m exhausted.’ I mean you’re only forty so, presumably, you’re still able to fuck?
Cheap, and he will not rise to that. Just a grim shrug and one brow alone lifting up.
Yes, presumably, but this is going around in circles so I’m off to bed.
McBride then concludes the section with a standard paragraph before jumping in time again, with:
This Autumn Gone
Camden. September. Two months past, if now feeling more. Flipping its days between nippy and warm. Morning over bodies. Fast wrapped. Legs and arms. Mine, by itself, in the start of a dawning. Yours, at the moment, asleep. All dauntless so, I scratched my nose on your chin.
End of extended excerpting! Is this not a lot of effort? Or at least a strenuous lift for a character study/troubled-relationship novel? Fiction, Babitz wrote in explaining how it wasn’t the ideal genre for her discursive style, “must move right along.” She preferred asides and gossip, and while her days may have been languid and her company namedrop-filled, her prose was well-limned, even snappy. To borrow Eve’s subtitle, I wanted from McBride more “the world, the flesh, and London,” particularly the titular city: the two main characters may undergo a change, but this novel is full of dreary interiors, be they post-bacchanalian or “trying to live the straight life,” and spends little time exploring/exposing London.
Part of me admires McBride’s chutzpah, her commitment to “the art of the novel.” Part of me thinks he could’ve read a whole Sally Rooney book or Eve’s Hollywood in the time it took to transcribe that one-page excerpt. Yet another part of me can’t imagine calling anything “overwritten” because I admire all sorts of go-big-or-go-home writers, be it Euro-monoliths like Krasznahorkai and Tokarczuk, American eclecticists like Matthiessen and Sorrentino (père et fils), bulky bookclubbers like Tartt and Doerr, or conflator-inventioneers like David Mitchell and George Saunders. I certainly don’t want to soapbox for more Carver/Hempel imitators or sub-100,000 word “novels” full of white space and cheeky riffing about how much Twitter/Tinder/Insta/“the portal” sucks.
A mileage-varies novel for pages 1-175 of 325 then, this latest McBride. There are Babitz-like inversions and interjectory observations about the male form that come after an argument involving a hurled Piccalilli jar (Eil does the toss) and Stephen being too haphazard in picking up the shards. From the aftermath: “But he doesn’t want to talk more. Just folds himself over in the manner of the gaunt, and stares into the bloodied kitchen roll, waiting for whatever comes next. My hands, meanwhile, go terrible, thinking they can architect some way out of this.”
If you like “architect” as a verb and hands that “go terrible,” thus allowing the reader to use their imagination (as I do), this is an enhancer. If you think “the gaunt” actually have a variety of ways of behaving in response to bloodletting and that people besides the slim and slender can fold themselves over (as I do), this is a detriment.
Later, a drunken Eily wants the daily dose of her man’s phallus but Stephen has his daughter Grace spending the night in the next room over so he refuses to scratch his partner’s coital itch. It’s cringe-causing, the pathos is earned, but it also feels derivative of Fleabag while excluding the humor. And though McBride’s prose is largely a strength, there are clunkers: “And for a brief moment, let the weather do its work. Storm skirling drainpipes below us and aerials above. Gale, for a change, on the outside of us. Us and our hands, for once, not being useless.” Reconciliation in a rainstorm = Gale on the outside for a change? Grr. Our debauched born-to-lose hands not being clumsy and doomed to fail/flail/twirl Smiths albums? Oy vey. My thoughts alighted on the pupil in front of me in homeroom in 1994 transcribing grunge lyrics in a five-subject notebook with a red pen.
As it progresses, McBride’s book starts to read as just too much thinly disguised self-portrait: nineties-ite who slept on floors and had sex with a smattering of far-from-banker dudes describes a nineties-ite sleeping on floors and having an explosive carnal relationship that she already mined in a previous (and not her best) novel. I began contemplating whether it would benefit or suffer from a more traditionalistic form, and just which misogynies a male author might be pilloried for if he’d crafted such a petty/erratic/reckless/bordering-on-violent female protagonist (or if he’d be mocked for making a forty-year-old with a nympho girlfriend half his age an auteur hero). I also started to recall the tidier novels of Christine Schutt, Anna DeForest, and Emily Hall, to recollect the inventive-but-more-naturally-so sentences of Garielle Lutz, Claire Messud, and John Brandon.
But at page 175 I arrived at the screenplay, weary of the gameswomanship and the trickery, and it’s downright transcendent, even mesmerizing. One can see the independent film it describes and it’s believable, immersive, handling potentially maudlin material with subtlety and nuance yet without eliding horror. It unfurls in the mind, the sustained dream that the Jonathan Franzens (and John Gardners) of the world have been praising for decades; the ensorcellment, the incantatory rendering accomplished on the page.
The rough cut of the autobiographical film Stephen’s put together is screened by its director along with his savior-girlfriend-muse Eily and his loving/lovable daughter Grace. The film details Stephen’s rough life and it hits the most bottomed-out moments of Trainspotting, it captures an earned (and more redemptive) air of Morvern Callar and Ratcatcher.
INTERIOR. TOILETS. EVENING. BLACK. Bleep. Bleep. Medical sounding. Tinny and rhythmic. But disinterested enough to resolve into background the second his sight starts to return. Young man coming to, again. He is here and not yet dead which is a surprise, even to himself.
EXTERIOR. ARCHWAY. EVENING. London going as he goes but also rounding on him. Trapping him inside coils of illogical motion.
An extended excerpt of multiple pages then, finally broken by Eil inserting a commentary:
Can’t help smiling. Nor Grace. Even you smile at it. Beguiling shot. Unexpected.
I don’t remember that in the script.
Last-minute rewrite.
Did it happen though?
Yeah, it did.
So did she make you go in?
Wait and see.
Whether or not you’re the type of reader who can’t wait to see more and thinks they might be beguiled by McBride’s novel should be apparent by now. As much as I wanted to adore this text, I wasn’t, to borrow a word from the opening gambol-gambit of Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company, “seduced.” A review by Ruth Gilligan in LA Review of Books states that for many readers and writers, McBride’s debut was “the beginning of a new phase in contemporary mainstream fiction” and the start of a major career. I can’t say I perceive that. Since A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, there’s been too much modern-day modernist shtick. But “cinematic” is one of the most overused words in critical discourse—and has been for the better part of a century—and a novel that actually manages to be filmic (or vice-versa) is rare, and while the instantiation of Stephen’s suffering and his overcoming of it comprises only a portion of the novel, a portrayal of survivorship that jettisons the trappings of victimhood (in our online virtue signalling and politicking, we cling to those trappings so hard that it may be destroying us all) is a rare thing in a movie or a novel.
