In August 2021, many Dubliners became convinced that the Luas was free. The delusion ran so deep that Dublin Airport posted about it; Transport Infrastructure Ireland contacted the gardaí. The source of this strange phenomenon was a seemingly innocuous, vaguely funny tweet from the journalist Carl Kinsella.
In At Least It Looks Good From Space, he reflects on his achievement with ambivalence, a kind of gleeful mortification: “I felt like a kid at a birthday party who’d gathered all his aunts and uncles in a circle so they could watch me do a cool new trick, and instead I’d whacked my head off the corner of the kitchen counter and now wanted everyone to stop looking as I quietly bled out.” It was Kinsella’s first tortured and tantalising taste of virality.
At Least It Looks Good From Space is, in general terms, a collection of essays preoccupied by what the Internet Age means for the individual and the individual’s imagination. In particular, it is about what the Internet Age means for a fairly young Irish man who has OCD and is prone to various kinds of catastrophic thinking.
These may be lofty themes, but Kinsella proves a sharp satirist and a shrewd observer of the minutiae of Irish life. He recalls his J1 pilgrimage to New York and muses on the visa’s “outsized cultural imprint”, its heady promise of freedom, bar work and a “few thousand dollars” before “returning to your Business and Economics course in UCD or your graduate job at Anglo-Irish Bank”.
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Later, Kinsella remembers the peril and pleasure of leaving Mass early, and accurately relays that the Communion provides a welcome interval during which you can make an easy exit, wafer consumed and salvation secured.
Elsewhere, he slides – you might be tempted, because the contrast is so stark, to say lapses – into lyricism. But this incongruence is the achievement of the collection. It makes the real funniness of his writing an almost fugitive triumph, snatched from the jaws of panic and paranoia, and all the more compelling for being so humane.
At Least It Looks Good From Space exists in that space between comedy and calamity. Kinsella knows the margins are narrow, but, as he repeatedly writes, “it is within these fine margins that the people we love save our lives”.
