Cork writer Danielle McLaughlin famously only began writing at the age of 40. In 2015 she published her near-perfect debut collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets and in 2019 she won both the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and a Windham-Campbell Grant worth $165,000.
A debut novel, The Art of Falling, followed in 2021, and now she returns with Rituals, a brief and touching novel about a middle-aged woman called Joan. Joan is a civil servant in her 50s who has been forced to take a career break after an incident at work. Living alone, she is free to indulge her compulsions, or rituals. For example, she removes a small plastic rabbit from a dish and puts him in a conch on the mantelpiece when she is leaving the house, and must return him to his dish upon her return to the house. When she takes in a vulnerable student as a lodger, she is forced to reassess her own behaviours and her life.
McLaughlin works magic with the tiniest of details, using her careful observations to expertly expose society’s flaws and attitudes. The briefest facts about Joan’s neighbour, the lodger’s mother or Joan’s Irish-language tutor, for example, all effortlessly highlight the horrifying but commonplace struggles of women. The catalyst for Joan’s career break gives a heartbreaking insight into her inner emotional life, while furiously skewering the gendered double standards often at play in the workplace.
While there are many poignant moments, Joan’s own inner monologue is frequently scathingly funny. When talking about a reality TV programme, Joan describes it as “the kind where beautiful women get paired with the sort of men one would try to avoid if one bumped into them in Reardon’s”.
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One of the things McLaughlin does so well, both in her novels and short stories, is the balancing of tension with the drip-feed of information that slowly brings the story into delectable focus. As Joan and her lodger navigate their new roles as housemates, their irritating habits fall away as their kindness, humanity and vulnerability rise to the fore. By the time I reached the surprisingly sentimental ending, I was utterly seduced by the characters, and indeed by McLaughlin’s convincing hypothesis that with a little care and love much of life’s cruel realities can be borne, if not overcome.
Edel Coffey, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a journalist and broadcaster. Her latest novel, In Glass Houses, is published by Sphere.
