“Two days after she disappeared, most of my mother’s body washed up in Flushing Creek.” This is the first sentence of Catherine Airey’s debut novel, and it betrays the author as a close student of the artful beginning. Even better is the rest of the opening paragraph: “The morgue had comfy armchairs in the lobby, and I can remember being annoyed that it didn’t take longer for my father to identify the body. I was reading Little Women and would have quite happily sat there all day. I was nine.”
Considerable craft is at work in this paragraph. A mystery is dangled (why and how did the mother disappear? How did she die?). A theme is stated (this is a novel about little women, that is, young women). Psychological acuity is displayed (our narrator is “annoyed” as she waits for her father to identify her mother’s body; she prefers her book, just as a real child might, especially one confronted with a horror impossible to accept).
We’re in good hands. The reader sits up. Third paragraph: “Almost exactly seven years later, my father jumped from the 104th floor of the World Trade Center, North Tower. I don’t know that he jumped for sure, but it’s the story I’ve told myself.”
Our narrator is Cora (Coraline) Brady, 16 years old and still nominally attending Catholic high school in New York when the planes hit the twin towers and her father, who works for Cantor Fitzgerald, is killed. Instead of actually going to school, Cora has been skiving off with her dirtbag drug-dealer boyfriend, Kyle. It is Kyle who has supplied Cora with the tab of acid she takes, an hour before the planes hit the towers. In the days after the attacks, Kyle ghosts Cora. She wanders the city, numb, an orphan.
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The subject is trauma but what marks this first, 50-page section of the novel is readerly bliss. The prose rolls smoothly along, the characters live, the details (as in a flashback sequence set at a Christmas party in the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the North Tower, where Cora notes that the tables are packed too closely together and nobody can move) are beautifully judged.
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It’s fairly standard publishing practice for novels to be bought on the basis of their first 50 pages; in this case, you can see why the first 50 pages of Confessions prompted “a six-figure pre-empt”, as the book-biz jargon has it.
Airey’s storytelling, in these first 50 pages, is so good that you happily ignore certain niggles. For instance: the contemporary novel has a marked tendency to boil away historical complexity until all that’s left is personal trauma, and this is especially so in the case of the September 11th attacks. How often has 9/11 appeared in a contemporary novel or film as an awful, motiveless thing happening to a single person? And not as, say, an intelligible, if complex, historical event, with systemic ramifications of various kinds.
And again: the orphaned Cora, in New York, receives a letter from her aunt Roisin, who lives in Burtonport, Co Donegal, and who offers, despite family estrangement, to accept her obligations as Cora’s legal guardian. The reader doesn’t really want to leave Cora, or New York – we’re just getting started – but this is what the novel does. It becomes a multigenerational, transatlantic family saga, swerving back in time to Donegal in the 1970s, tracing the histories of the Dooley sisters: Roisin, whose diary takes us through the late 1970s, and Maire, an artist, who moves to New York in the early 1980s and whose sections are narrated in the second person.
Confessions never goes back to Cora-as-narrator, nor does it return to 9/11, except, again, as a shorthand marker of personal trauma. Instead, it constructs a complex map of family pain and forgetting, with a pointedly feminist emphasis on the experiences of women. As a teenager, Maire becomes the artist in residence for a primal-scream centre for women; in New York, a key scene takes place at Judy Chicago’s landmark feminist artwork, The Dinner Party; later, Cora, as a grown-up, becomes a pro-choice activist, in Ireland and America. For all of this, however, Confessions doesn’t ever quite attain the status of political, or politicised, novel. After its barnstormer of a beginning, it settles, in its middle reaches, a bit too often for generating no more than a misty sense of sad linked lives.
But this is carping. For a first novel, Confessions is remarkably confident, complex and nuanced, and if the rest of the book doesn’t quite live up to the smooth superbity of its first 50 pages, it’s nonetheless the work of a writer of impressive, and impressively various, talents.
Kevin Power is assistant professor of literary practice at Trinity College Dublin
