FICTION: Best Love, Rosie By Nuala O'FaolainNew Island, 446pp. €13.99
Thus writes Rosie, in a note to her editor, MarkC@rmbooks.com, one of many e-mails quoted in this novel, which deals with the theme of growing old in general and in particular the challenges of old age for single women. Happiness is the goal in the late Nuala O’Faolain’s post-menopausal characters seek – not wild bliss, just ordinary contentment. Peace.
Rosie, the middle-aged heroine, is writing a self-help book for the older woman, a collection of meditations and tips. She is also caring for her eccentric and alcoholic elderly aunt, Min. The relationship of location to perception of self and life is an important theme of the book, and, in a somewhat implausible but symbolically effective plot twist, old Min is completely rejuvenated by her late discovery of America, while Rosie leaves Manhattan and finds her happiness back home. She reconnects with history, her family’s and the country’s, in a seaside cottage in Wexford. Here, the most ordinary experiences fill the erstwhile globe-trotting Rosie with joy – bringing in the laundry from the line, “the sheets carrying a subtle chill from the breezes which had dried them”, or setting the table for breakfast, with a mug and a knife and fork. There is of course a great poignancy in realising that Rosie’s experience of serenity in the cottage in Wexford, probably reflects O’Faolain’s own pleasure in her cottage in Clare – a joy which tragically ended this day last year with her premature death.
Rosie’s thoughts (and e-mails) on life, ageing and death, give this novel a quality very different from what the popularising cover and title might lead you to expect. She is particularly sharp and insightful on aspects of women’s experience:
“Rilke didn’t have to look after his aunt . . . he had it easy compared to people who have no choice but to look after their elderly relations, a subject on which, by the way, in spite of it happening to nearly everybody, there is no literature.”
The novel is rich with arresting comments:
“She had a little repertory of women’s conventional expressions; the frowning way they all scrutinise a piece of clothing; or the way they coo over another woman’s baby; or the stern look at a man on a market stall when he’s picking out the tomatoes they’re buying. I know that my own expressions copied Min’s. But where did Min acquire hers?”
Such observations, which reflect O’Faolain’s greatest talent – for a unique kind of journalism, a sort of ethnography – are among the most striking and valuable aspects of the novel, which is a curious mixture of the profound and the banal. The plot, though mercifully simple in these days of almost obligatory sensationalism even in the best literature, lapses into contrivance more than once. For instance, the resolution of a financial challenge by a sudden commission to write texts for T- shirts stretches the reader’s credulity (even if irony is intended): Rosie, short of funds to buy her family cottage, is offered $30,000 for three slogans for T-shirts for the ageing woman – one such slogan being “Fix Your Hair”. Wouldn’t it be great if you could get your hands on money so easily!
Side by side with such inanities, however, is excellent psychological and social insight, and wisdom culled from much experience of life and literature. Rosie's literary frame of reference is impressive. She curls up on her sofa in the cottage to read Proust – O'Faolain was one of the few people I have known who read the Remembrance of Things Pastin its entirety (an achievement which pleased her, as well it might). Like her author, Rosie views life through a literary lens. Memories of works by Joyce, Baudelaire, Beckett, Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, and a host of others (almost all male writers, another small irony in a novel devoted exclusively to women) pop into her head constantly, as she irons the clothes or walks the dog. These literary references are unstrained, occurring as spontaneously and regularly as ponderings on what to cook for dinner or what to wear at a party – as they do in real life for many people, but not so often in light literature (where if people quote it is usually from Shakespeare or Yeats, "the early Yeats", as Rosie rather snootily points out to some friend).
But Rosie generally wears her learning, and her philosophy, and her spirituality, lightly. The novel succeeds in blending the deep and the shallow, the wise and the mildly absurd, in a series of seamless transitions from kitchen to library, frocks to philosophy, body to mind.
Stylistically, it is chatty and personable. The slight tension engendered by the contrast of serious theme and light form may well be the result of deliberate authorial intention. Throughout the novel Rosie is in constant, bantering conflict with her editor, who enjoins her to "dumb down" her meditations on ageing in order to reach a wider market. Best Love, Rosiemay reflect a similar sort of internalised conflict (I mean within the world of the novel; I am quite sure O'Faolain's editors at New Island have the highest literary ideals). But the mixture of the light and the serious is undoubtedly also brought about by the author's own attitude to life. O'Faolain was brilliant, educated, deeply thoughtful, but she was down to earth and despised pretension. So does her book. That is its great charm, and that is why it resists categorisation. There will be no ready made niche for it in the bookshop.
It is just Nuala.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer. She currently teaches on the MA in Creative Writing in UCD