Rosita Sweetman on Eggshells: ‘without a doubt the best new novel of the year’

Eggshells, Catriona Lally’s debut novel, is fantastically good. Cracking off thusly: “When I return to my great aunt’s house with her ashes, the air feels uncertain, as if it doesn’t know how to deal with me. My great-aunt died three weeks ago, but there is still a faint waft of her in every room – of lavender cologne mixed with soiled underthings.”

Jeez, talk about an arresting opening; those “soiled underthings” surging up through the prose like a missile from a sub. Wow.

Who knows when “mainstream” Irish fiction morphed from everyone down on the farm deeply depressed and it raining all the time, to everyone being in suburban dysfunctional families with incest, teenage pregnancy and alcoholism by page 4, but in Eggshells Lally has triumphantly leapfrogged both formulaic genres to produce a genuine original.

Yippee!

Lally’s heroine, Vivian (Viv) is lonely, rejected, misunderstood and in Phibsborough. Alone (in the aforementioned great aunt’s house), without a past or a future – her parents told her she was a changeling, and her nasty sis wants nothing to do with her – without any of the things that tie us to life (job, boyfriend, family), she sets about making sense of a reality that makes no sense.

That Lally has managed to make her unusual heroine not only utterly lovable but also utterly believable, is the core of Eggshells genius. We all have our inner Vivian – logical to the point of mad; insanely courageous in the face of the brutality of existence.

In between screaming with laughther (the kids in the wheelchairs/ pretending to be in a coffin/ eating blue for a day/ meeting Penelope for the first time/ going to visit Penelope and Penelope’s mother/ she and Penelope digging Viv’s grave/ going to visit nasty sis and kids), I cried my eyes out.

Without a doubt this is the best new novel of the year.

Rosita Sweetman is a writer and journalist. She has published three books, On Our Knees, a look at Ireland in the 1970s, Fathers Come First, a novel, and On Our Backs, a look at sexual attitudes in 1980s Ireland