She's the One, By Cathy Kelly, Poolbeg, 576pp, £6.99
Too Little, Too Late, By Colette Caddle, Poolbeg, 528pp, £6.99
Maddy Goes to Hollywood, By Maureen Martella, Arrow, 391pp, £5.99
The boom in Irish-published best-sellers - a phenomenon which began with Patricia Scanlan - represents one of the greatest changes in the writing, publishing and reading of Irish novels in the last 10 years. In less than a decade Poolbeg has established a list of authors who feature regularly at the top of the fiction best-seller list - hot property writers like Marian Keyes and Cathy Kelly, the latter currently riding high in the bestseller lists with She's the One. Poolbeg's success is a story in itself, and according to its marketing manager Paula Campbell, most of its bestseller authors arrive either by word of mouth between writers, or because of Poolbeg's profile as a publisher which has "learned how to do mass market fiction, and do it well".
Poolbeg has also realised that women buy the most books. The popular fiction market is voracious: readers in this genre buy and read books at an incredible rate, and are practised and discerning in deciding whether novels fulfil their generic requirements - and why. Word of mouth can make or break a new book, so new writers like Colette Caddle and Maureen Martella are entering a pressurised market.
Despite its growing confidence, this genre remains the great unwashed of Irish culture, suffering badly from the association between Irishness and "serious" literature which goes against popular successes. Popular fiction is disdained by many critics as escapist and predictable fantasy, but if you want to know what is going on in the lives of Irish women, look no further than these populist books. Their very success depends on their appearing to deal with the "real" lives of "real" women. This is popular fiction aimed at young women in their 20s and 30s who want to read light-hearted books about ordinary (and often badly behaved) young women living the good life.
The current best-seller, Cathy Kelly's She's the One, centres on Dee, a reporter for an Irish daily paper, and Isobel, an editor returning to Ireland with her daughters to escape a failed marriage. Isobel gets the job of women's editor and Dee, disappointedly, takes the job of deputy. Despite Dee's initial resentment, the two women become close friends and along the way leave behind their unhappy partnerships. Our heroines overcome all manner of humiliations and bullying to realise that the orthodox signs of commitment (Dee's engagement and Isobel's marriage) are meaningless if they lack the cement of shared domestic responsibilities.
Kelly takes seriously the issue of power at a local level, the idea that for a working couple the question of who does the washing, who looks after the children and who organises the budget are exercises in equality. If they cannot gain respect, Dee and Isobel prefer to be single than to work all day and then face the "woman's work" of the home each evening. Kelly explores the demands on women to mother men with easy humour, and the way her story validates women's needs explains much of their popularity.
Colette Caddle's Too Little, Too Late, which also recently dominated the bestseller lists, is another good example of Poolbeg's style. The story, a winning combination of food and romance (with surprisingly little sex) revolves around Stephanie West, manager of an up-market Dublin restaurant, Chez Nous. Stephanie loves her job, but hates the owner and head chef Chris Connolly, a nasty, self-obsessed character who is, unfortunately, married to Liz, one of Stephanie's best friends. The story follows the fortunes of Stephanie (a modern career woman determined not to marry) and Liz (getting over a bad marriage and looking for work) when Stephanie decides to buy her boss out.
We are quickly drawn into the lives of these women, and the web of friends and relations who connect them. Much of the story is about the crunch between work and relationships, but a darker central drama concerns the effects of pregnancy on women's lives. The tragic death of a school-friend has left Stephanie struggling with the past, terrified of anything that might make her dependant on a man. The genre treads ambiguously between reality and fantasy, and one sign of this is that the shadow of the past can, like the reader's real life, be put temporarily out of mind until the climax of the novel. Divorce, separation and abortion all play parts in the plot, as similar issues do in so many of these books. Such crises essentially illustrate that the heroines have many choices, thrashing out issues about responsibility and living with their mistakes. Significantly, women run the show at home and at work.
Nineties-style Irish women's popular novels typically revolve around women's success stories and the importance of female friendships in nurturing the heroine's struggle to take charge of her own life. It's only another woman who can be there when the heroine is crying in the toilet at work. One of Kelly's heroines describes her main problem as "the classic female mistake: losing touch with girlfriends" when a man gets serious. But these stories tell us that the real female mistake is putting up with selfish men and letting yourself be taken for granted. In one sense these novels are saying the obvious: but it is the fact that the majority of men remain oblivious to what is blindingly obvious to our heroines that makes these stories so powerfully attractive. The story is fast-moving, easy to read and motors along on bottles of wine, gallons of coffee and lots of girl talk. Caddle's style is gently comic, offering readers believable conflicts between friends, colleagues and lovers, as well as the "realism" of lots of recognisable landmarks of everyday Irish life. The style of the book is intentionally such that it is easy to forget this is a story, and not a retelling of someone's real life. Caddle is already a mistress of the conventions of this genre and "will have readers laughing and crying along with the heroine every step of the way!"
Maureen Martella's Maddy Goes to Holly- wood is a different kind of book, altogether more fantastical and improbable. Martella follows the fortunes of Maddy O'Toole, a 33-year-old housewife stuck on the creepy family farm with her backward and slightly twisted mother, husband and two children. All that sustains our heroine is a weekly dose of titillation from Carlos, the star of her favourite American soap. Maddy discovers her long-lost sister Gloria is a Hollywood scriptwriter for this very programme. Even better, Gloria lives with Carlos, and they want Maddy to become a surrogate mother for them, taking the natural route to conception with Carlos. Maddy quickly begins acting out the central fantasy of her life (hot sex with Carlos), and Martella cleverly weaves together two of the most popular genres, soap opera and romance fiction, while touching on more painful maternal issues. The riotous story and flippant humour work against the kind of intimacy and close identification with heroines that Caddle achieves. Martella's racy style is attractive, but it takes a bit longer to get stuck into the story. Martella's novel usefully illustrates that popular fiction is not a static genre - its conventions are open to innovation.
Novels like these live up to their promise of entertainment and indulgence - but this does not exclude the fact that they also say something important about the lives of Irish women, and as such, books like these have as much to tell us about modern Irish culture as any fictions.
Kathy Cremin is a researcher at the Centre for Women's Studies at the University of York. She will chair a discussion on popular fiction with guests Patricia Scanlan, Lilian Roberts Finlay and Mary Ryan at Celebrating Irish Women's Writing, the seventh annual conference of the Women's Education Research and Resource Centre,University College Dublin, May 26th to 29th