`There's a dull stench. I think it's the garbage. But it's me." Two ambulance men arrive at the apartment of a minor black movie star named Irene O'Brien. She appears to have overdosed, curled on her side on the kitchen floor, naked. As they prepare to haul her body away, another ambulance screams up. Three of the four medics go off to lunch, leaving the fourth to deal with the body - which, just as it is about to be filed away and frozen, manages to wake up and say "Hi".
The kick-ass style, with its short sentences and sassy attitudes, is straight out of crime fiction and the situation has enormous comic potential; but there are few laughs in Marsha Hunt's determinedly downbeat fifth novel, as the prefacing quote from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath - "And her joy was nearly like sorrow" - should, perhaps, warn us. True, Irene survives her own suicide to tell her own tale. "Just yesterday in a Berkeley bookstore, I heard somebody mention Irene O'Brien and the sales assistant quipped, `Killed herself back in the sixties'. It was all I could do not to tap him on the shoulder and say, `No, I even messed that up' . . ."
But what a doleful tale it is. It begins with the Great Depression and a miserably poor childhood in New Jersey - absent father, distraught mother, two hungry children and a demented Irish landlord, Mack O'Brien, who practises casual sexual abuse on the young Irene and is eventually arrested for the murder of his wife. When the spectre of starvation finally looms the family begins to shift uneasily from place to place, going "home" to Mississippi and then west to California, where tap-dancing lessons provide Irene and her sister with both temporary happiness and the promise of an escape route.
The girls form a singing duo and launch a career as The O'Brien Sisters - the terrible irony of which, as the elder Irene wryly points out, sails completely over her eight-year-old head. There follows a disastrous marriage to a feckless trumpeter, and by the time - almost half-way through the book - Irene gets pregnant, the despairing reader is praying for a miracle. A bouncy little baby with big eyes and a joyous smile would help turn things around, surely? But typically, having tried to force a miscarriage by repeatedly hurling herself down steps and then swallowing pills worth $10 bought from the friend of a friend, Irene gives birth to the autistic Nadine, whose fate - though we won't reveal it here - can surely be guessed at. And when, in the second half of the book, the heroine's circuitous life leads her to Hollywood, it turns out to be a den of cheerful corruption which drives her to drink, drugs and depression. Salvation of a kind arrives in the form of the ambulance driver Charlie, a draft dodger and philosopher who spirits the officially dead Irene away to his uncle's house in northern California, where she embarks on a shadowy, surreal semi-existence under the name of Venus Johnson, sharing drugs with Charlie and reading Roland Barthes by starlight.
Hunt scores political points by the dozen. Irene's successive incarnations (daughter, wife, mother, star) serve both to keep the pages turning and as a kind of vicious spiral, turning through the apparently endless layers of humiliation to which a black woman - even, or perhaps especially, a beautiful, talented black woman - can be subjected by American society. The narrative voice is defiant and seductive and the minor characters, down to the smallest bit players, are beautifully observed.
In the end, though, the book's success hinges on the success or failure of the character of Irene. She will undoubtedly be too deadpan for some readers, but Hunt's refusal to sensationalise her narration of unquestionably sensational events is commendable, and her studied detachment lends yet another layer of complexity to this anything-but-simple rags-and-riches story.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times staff journalist
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