Even in the age of conglomeration – when the average novel features merely as an insignificant line item on the balance sheet of a titanic multinational – publishing remains a noble enterprise. Also, happily, an amusing one.
Amusement derives from the fact that publishers have absolutely no idea what people want to read until all at once a particular book sells in droves – at which point commissioning editors scramble to find lots of books just like it, turning the bookshop shelves into a slightly uncanny parade of homogeneous entities, like Andy Warhol’s duplicated soup cans.
If you liked that, try this! Hence all those YA cover versions of The Hunger Games (The Scorch Trials?); hence David Baldacci’s series of thrillers about John Puller, who is in no way a wholly saturated derivative of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher; and so on, ad infinitum.
This is a roundabout way of saying that Gráinne O’Hare’s debut novel, Thirst Trap, is being insistently marketed in such a way as to appeal to fans of Sally Rooney, Eliza Clark, Naoise Dolan et al. The Dolan readership in particular has been micro-targeted, as they say in marketing seminars: Thirst Trap’s cover design is a dead ringer for the cover of Exciting Times; the jacket copy mentions “the very best and the very worst”, though not the most exciting, “of times”.
The problem with all of this isn’t that it’s cynical. (Actually, like all marketing, it’s sort of ingenuous, in that it hopes that people can be persuaded by the straightforward invocation of things that they already like.) The problem is that it tends to efface the individuality of a given novel – which only really matters, of course, when a given novel has some individuality to speak of. Which is to say that while Thirst Trap does share certain qualities with Exciting Times (a generational ambience, a matter-of-fact attitude to queerness, an interest in the between-state of being in your 20s), it is the work of a writer with a distinctive sensibility and with gifts and perceptions of her own.
O’Hare has been publishing short fiction in various Irish and UK venues over the last couple of years. A young Belfast writer who now lives in England (where she is pursuing a PhD in 18th-century women’s life writing), she has written a novel about what it’s like to be a young woman in contemporary Belfast. It’s an absolute riot – funny, compassionate, observant and wise, the work of a real writer.
A “thirst trap”, for my non-Generation Z (or non-terminally-online) readers, is a sexy picture of oneself, posted online in order to attract attention. In O’Hare’s sly usage, however, it might also refer to the experience of being in your late 20s in a contemporary western country, when the culture around you is largely oriented towards “the sesh” – a world in which crippling hangovers are taken for granted, in which life happens, if it happens at all, in pubs and clubs, and in which a sort of tacit alcoholism underwrites, and undermines, the quest for a meaningful life.
O’Hare’s present-tense narrative follows three characters, all of them about to hit 30. Maggie, a legal secretary, is gay; she is being strung along by Cate, who calls Maggie when she’s drunk. Roise, who works in a “corporate hellscape”, is straight, and fancies Adam, her “superior” at the bland office where she works. Harley is bisexual, works in a hotel, and pursues self-destruction, or self-obliteration, via cocaine and one-night stands.
This all sounds very standard-issue but O’Hare attends so closely, so wittily, and so empathetically to every single one of these characters that the events of their lives assume the seismic importance of, precisely, events in life. There is no cynicism or amateurism here – only a nuanced and non-judgmental engagement with character that is the essence of the best fiction.
The three women all share a tumbledown rented house. The fourth member of their quartet, Lydia, has been killed in a car crash a year before the action of the novel begins, and lingers as a shaping presence in their lives. Early in the novel, Maggie practises running up and down the stairs of the rented house, but stops when she remembers “there’s rot below”. The rot, of course, is below these young women’s lives; the house might be the house of capitalism, though the book doesn’t make a big deal of the suggestion – it isn’t that sort of novel.
It is, rather, the sort of book that involves you skilfully in the thoughts and feelings of persuasive characters. It bounces along, cracking jokes, scarcely putting a foot wrong, except in the (slightly too sentimental) epilogue. It is enormously impressive and fun. As the marketing department might say: if you like good books, try this.
Kevin Power is associate professor of literary practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin
