There’s a page on Goodreads devoted to “books where nothing happens”, which includes among its long and random list of titles, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Lily King’s Writers and Lovers, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation.
Anyone with even a vague knowledge of these novels could argue against this categorisation. The tag seems less about the respective books and more about a general lack of engagement from readers who didn’t spend time noticing both the material events of the novel, and the fact that plot often exists only to get us closer to the interior world of characters. In her essay collection Oppositions, Mary Gaitskill puts it this way: “In any genuine piece of fiction, the plot is like the surface personality or external body of a human being; it serves to contain the subconscious and viscera of the story.”
Rachel Connolly’s debut novel Lazy City will, I suspect, find itself branded with the “nothing happens” tag but this does a disservice to the author’s complex and authentic exploration of the effects of trauma on a woman in her late 20s. Set over a year in contemporary Belfast, there is a propulsive quality to Connolly’s writing that keeps us invested in the fortunes of her protagonist Erin as she tries to deal with the sudden death of a close female friend.
Unmoored by grief, Erin returns to her childhood home in Belfast hoping for comfort but instead is met with strife, envy and bitterness from a mother who resented her daughter going to college in the UK and who seems equally, grotesquely resentful of the recent tragedy in her daughter’s life. Related in a series of terse, compelling scenes, this competition of victimhood feels alarmingly real: “Now her brother. A brother in a bombing is always the trump card.”
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A pragmatic and refreshingly capable heroine, Erin moves out and finds work as an au pair in a wealthy suburb of the city. The rest of the novel charts the stasis and progress of her recovery: the working days, the booze-filled nights, her encounters with an on-off boyfriend and an American academic she meets at a bar.
Born in Belfast in 1993, Connolly now lives in London. Known for her sharp cultural criticism, she has written for publications such as the New York Times, New York Magazine and the Guardian. There is much to admire in her debut novel, which doesn’t sensationalise the mystery of the friend’s death, letting the story unfold in a way that feels realistic and earned.
The author’s background as a journalist comes through in the distinct absence of sentimentality in the narrative voice, and in her observational skills on place and character: “The sort of laugh which is intended to make a statement seem softer, less pointed, but often has the opposite effect … he’s not old but he’s old enough for his face to have set in certain places.”
Connolly is strong on friendship, intimacy, dysfunctional relationships, the transactional nature of casual sex, where each person is seeking something – relief, escape, distraction – from the other. The details of alcohol and drug-fuelled sessions are similarly vibrant. The milieu and thematic concerns call to mind Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperations and, particularly, Michael Magee’s Close To Home. (Connolly wrote an entertaining article on the tiresome inevitability of such comparisons earlier this year for the Guardian, a valiant attempt at reclaiming the narrative.)
Formulaic comparisons aside, it has to be said that both Nolan and Magee’s stylistically slick fiction serve to highlight one of the downsides of Lazy City: the prose, on a line level, tends towards the pedestrian. Sometimes this works well, as when Erin relates difficult emotional truths, but cumulatively it draws attention to a certain flatness in the narrative arc.
There is the sense that Connolly hasn’t yet mastered the novelistic skill of filtering: “I’m thirsty as well as nauseous, maybe still tired too. I can’t tell past the nausea … [A hangover is muted] thanks to the coffee or the painkillers.” Mundane passages on ironing, eye make-up, the cyclical fashions of jeans, Mass times, compound the problem. Good fiction needs ordinary detail to contrast the dynamic, but the balance here is a little off.
In its best moments, of which there are many, Lazy City transcends these issues by its clear-eyed chronicling of human impulses. Connolly digs deep into the mess, Gaitskill’s viscera, and resurfaces with questions and reflections that are probing, sincere and keenly felt. “Post-conflict is when everyone is just trying to get on with their lives,” Erin notes of her homeland. The same can be said of the character’s circumstances: Lazy City is a novel about a woman nobly trying to just get by.
