There's plenty of fun to be had in Frances Macken's debut novel, a lively story about a small town girl with big dreams. Set in the fictional west of Ireland town of Glenbruff, You Have to Make Your Fun Around Here vividly captures life in a close-knit community, while examining the intricacies and anxieties of female friendship. We first meet Katie, the book's narrator, as a child, tearing around the fields near her house with her best friends Evelyn and Maeve. The depiction of the trio is relatable and evocative: Evelyn the daredevil; Katie the centrist; Maeve the one that gets in by default. As Macken highlights from the beginning, when you're young you don't get to choose your friends. Cousins, siblings, neighbours are really the luck of the draw.
From Claremorris, Co Mayo, the author has a BA in film and television production from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology and a masters in creative writing from Oxford. Her work has been shortlisted for national short story awards run by RTÉ and Penguin Ireland. She lives in Dublin with her husband and daughter. Her debut novel bears comparison to another recent debut, Michelle Gallen's Big Girl, Small Town, though the latter's prose is more finely tuned.
Billed as literary fiction, You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here is more commercial in scope. Character descriptions are striking: “Maeve has wispy hair that catches in the breeze, a small and compact barrelish body and a protruding tummy. She has large slate-grey eyes that droop at the outer corners, like a sad dog.” These descriptions are filmic in nature, though the pit-pat style gets repetitive after a while. Elsewhere, loose ends are hastily tied up, side characters flash in and out for plot purposes, coincidences abound – conversations overheard at opportune times, a boy Katie fancies working in the only coffee shop she goes into in Dublin – and there are unnecessary additions to the narrative in the form of hokey, unrealistic newspaper articles.
The book’s lengthy title is mirrored in the baggy style of the writing, which is let down by a tendency to overexplain character motivation and the mechanics of the plot. Katie is a vibrant creation, whose insights are often fresh and startling, particularly as she ages. But too often this same character trait is used to point out the obvious. One of many examples: “I suspect that Evelyn isn’t wholly pleased with me for going off to the Gaeltacht without her, and this show between herself and Maeve is a punishment.” Katie’s voice can also be oddly antiquated – “It was Evelyn set out to plant a seed of doubt about him, but I never allowed it germinate” – with overtones of rural Ireland that seem more suited to earlier in the 20th century.
A different era
For the book’s chief success is the way it captures a different era entirely, the liminal space between old and new Irelands, a time, just before the millennium, where Katie goes to college in Dublin with the hopes of landing a career in film. It is an age before social media and clean eating and Tinder. She shares a flat with two comically drawn sisters, Nuala and Norma, and quickly learns that life after college is hard work for someone whose parents aren’t wealthy. Katie’s yearning to better herself gives momentum to the book, and her thought-provoking insights along the way always ring true: “It’s important when you’ve good news to tell the right people. People who understand the dream or have a dream of their own. Otherwise you end up feeling deflated.”
You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here is in many ways a classic coming-of-age tale (despite a murky MacGuffin subplot of a missing girl). The awakenings are nicely paced and the central themes of longing, jealousy and ambition are examined in various inventive ways. At the heart of the book is the slippery, shifting friendship between best friends Katie and Evelyn. From a young age, Katie is in thrall to her spirited, selfish friend, who comes across as a modern-day Baba from The Country Girls.
Evelyn is a young woman who is going places: “Look at them all,” she says disdainfully. “Look at them all dressed the same and thinking the same thoughts.” The fragile sense of self underpinning the bravado is cleverly depicted by Macken in the later stages of the book. The ups-and-downs of going places is ultimately what makes the narrative come to life. The dizzying highs and terrifying lows, and the hard-won realisations when the rollercoaster stops: “Most of us are ordinary, and it’s important to accept it. A person has to be content to lead a normal life.”
