An epigraph from Philip Roth’s novel Deception sets the tone for Sarah Gilmartin’s third novel, Little Vanities – “The old, old story – deceived by life”. From the very first page, we get friendship, lies, recrimination, resentment, jealousy, betrayal and sex, bidden and forbidden. In other words, all the good stuff.
Limerick-born Gilmartin has developed a name for writing carefully calibrated, perspicacious books on family dynamics (her 2021 debut Dinner Party), gender dynamics (2023’s Service) and now friendship and marriage dynamics.
In all three of her novels, Gilmartin excels at complex and authentic characters. In Little Vanities, we meet various Dublin types. Dylan, a former professional rugby player, and Ben, a struggling actor, grew up together in Sallins and are more like brothers than friends. The pair meet Stevie, a cool, gorgeous girl from Killiney, when they go to Trinity College, and she and Ben have an on-off relationship. Twenty years later, the three are still friends, Ben and Stevie are still together and Dylan is now married to Rachel, with whom he has a daughter. As a late, working-class addition to the group, Rachel has always felt like an outsider.
When we first meet the couples, Dylan is struggling with the comedown of life post-rugby and what to do next when he is qualified for so little. He is also suffering from Long Covid. Rachel is grudgingly keeping everything afloat, while also trying to get pregnant again. Stevie works as a physio – “the competent adult in the relationship while [Ben] rolled around in glitter” – and is ruminating on whether she wants to have children or not. After years of rejection, Ben has finally landed a role in the Abbey adaptation of Harold Pinter’s play, Betrayal, which happens to tell the story of a man having an affair with his best friend’s wife. With Roth’s Deception and Pinter’s Betrayal now firmly planted as the two tentpoles of the story, the reader can settle in for the wincingly awful ride.
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Nobody is particularly happy and everyone is having a rough entry into the grown-up realities of adulthood. The book is beautifully structured with a strict formality that is designed for reading pleasure. We follow the characters over the course of a year, broken down into five individual months, and these parts are interspersed with four other parts devoted to the individual characters’ points of view.
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Each part scrupulously adheres to the form, folding backwards and forwards in time and passing the baton seamlessly from character to character with admirable ease. I found it compulsive, almost addictive reading, promising myself just one more page so many times before I lost count and surrendered to the impulse.
A key attraction of the book is Gilmartin’s enjoyably bleak humour and her descriptions hit their targets with a satisfying thwack. When Dylan is trying to remember his wife as she was when he first met her, he says: “He tried to see that person now but could only see his wife.” Also, I’ve never read quite such an accurate description of Irish music festivals as this line: “He only remembers the sweaty crowd and some headwrecker in a Roscommon jersey who kept shouting the lyrics to a Chumbawamba song.”
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The overlay of the Pinter play could feel heavy-handed, but Gilmartin uses it sparingly, knowing she only needs the tiniest tincture to colour her story. There are many levels of betrayal at work here, from the very obvious one of adultery to the less obvious but no less life-altering ones of parental, platonic and even self-betrayal, and Gilmartin modulates the louder drama with these more subtle treacheries.
While betrayal often brings destruction, destruction can sometimes bring release and renewal, and this allows space for a hopeful ending. Can betrayal sometimes be a good thing, the thing to blow out the stagnation and redraw the boundaries? Might it offer the perfect excuse to access a long-desired exit strategy or a portal to a more grown-up and ultimately happier reality?
Little Vanities is all about the small (in all senses of the word) delusions we nurture inside ourselves, and the gradual and necessary relinquishing of these false beliefs. “Maybe it was just the human condition,” Dylan says, “to spend the first half of your life trying to be someone and the second realising you always were.” A near-flawless novel from an Irish writer who just gets better and better.
Edel Coffey’s latest novel is In Glass Houses.
