As Bananarama once said, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. So the fact that Sligo-based writer Caragh Maxwell’s debut novel follows a well-trodden path needn’t worry us, since it’s so nicely done, it’s a pleasure to read anyway.
With Sugartown, we’re in the territory of the child of the family returning to the small-town home after living in the big smoke. In this case the big smoke is London, the child is 23-year-old Saoirse Maher, and home is somewhere in Ireland’s midlands, “hidden up a side road on the outskirts of civilisation”.
What changes when we go away? Nothing and everything because we have changed. From the first scene, Saoirse’s wider experience of life has made her nervous about the taxi driver taking her from Dublin Airport to her mother’s home. “Surreptitiously, while pretending to take a selfie, I’d snapped a photo of his driver badge [ ...] and sent it to Doireann, my best friend. If I go missing this is the taxi I was in xoxo.”
And so the prodigal daughter makes it home. But if her mother’s “hennish” quality is standard for mums in novels, Saoirse’s mother stands out in other ways. Why, the reader wonders, does Saoirse keep referring to her mother as Máire? Because, when Saoirse was a young child, her mother told her, “I was christened Máire Lynch. Not Mammy. That is not my name. I won’t speak to you if you don’t use my name.”
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This turns out to be the edge of a slippery pit we find out more about later, but in the meantime, Saoirse’s mother and father have divorced, and her mother – sorry, Máire – has remarried and had three much younger daughters. Her new man is amply characterised by the twin facts that he’s called JJ and that the limits of his conversation with Saoirse are stupefied cliches such as: “Always love your mother; you’ll never get another.”
Still, if living with her mother again isn’t where Saoirse pictured herself, there are other reasons to be happy to be home, where “the most enduring thing about this town is its proximity to Dublin”. Her aforesaid friend Doireann, for one, the stable friend who stayed in the small town to become a geography teacher. “Céad míle fáilte, bitch,” she greets her. Everyone needs a friend like Doireann. “I thought ya were dead,” she tells Saoirse late in the book after she goes AWOL. “Only for I seen your mam in Penneys and she told me you were wallowing.”
But there are new things for Saoirse to appreciate too, such as Charlie, a young man she meets through Doireann and her boyfriend. “I was smitten. I was doomed.” But Saoirse doesn’t seem to get a clear run of luck. It’s not that the first time she and Charlie have sex is disappointing – “Well that was quick.” “Who’s got forty minutes for an orgasm these days?” – but that she suspects he’s getting too close to another girl.
Is he really? Saoirse never makes things easy for herself. Information is dripped to the reader almost through asides, and the key turns out to be not what happened when Saoirse was away, but what happened before she left home. Some of these details could be a bit more explicit or shattering, but it sets us up nicely for the explosive outcome of the tension that’s been building between Saoirse and Máire from the start, aided by Saoirse’s increasingly dangerous appetite for every recreational drug bar heroin. What’s behind it all? As a Robin Williams character once said, if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.
If the overall shape of Sugartown is not new, what sets it apart is Maxwell’s eye for the telling detail and the mouthwatering turn of phrase. She is known to readers of this paper from her 2019 essay on her troubled relationship with her body, which was the most-read feature of its year in the books pages. Unsurprisingly, her way with words is in evidence in Sugartown, with the sort of descriptive precision that fixes objects in a new light for the reader. (Will I ever eat a sausage roll again without thinking of the insides as “pink Play-Doh meat”?)
Tethered to this style is a darkness underlying the quips that adds necessary depth and shade. And what’s best of all is that after a satisfying escalation of the story toward the end, Maxwell tops it off with an affecting and memorable closing scene that offers something new – but also unifies things beautifully.
