A Glassful of Letters by Evelyn Conlon Blackstaff 208pp, £7.99
A Name for Himself by Catherine Dunne Cape 278pp, £9.99 in UK
Both A glassful of Letters and A Name for Himself are second novels by women whose distinctive voices mark a significant departure from the predominantly confessional tone of contemporary fiction. In them, Conlon and Dunne make concerted efforts to dismantle the readers' preconceptions about mundane aspects of our everyday lives. They expose the multitude of contradictions and pains and surprises of which even the most mind-numbingly "normal" characters consist. Indeed, both writers emerge as champions of the individual, the Everyman and the Everywoman.
Conlon's A Glassful of Letters has a cast of diverse individuals who are bound together only by shared experiences, most of which have been accidental. It is almost as if the individuals had risen like phoenixes from an enormous pool of chaos. Everything that rises must converge, however, and so must Conlon's characters.
Connie, "the greatest blessing that could be bestowed on a street", mother of three and the long-suffering wife of the "slimy little prick" Desmond, is inextricably woven into the fabric of the street where Bernard (Desmond's unlikely father, but a generous soul and a recent widower) and Helena (an air hostess) and her gentle husband Kevin and their young son also live. Fergal, who has led a less than charmed life, owns a house on the street too, a house which he let out when faced with redundancy and a migratory working stint in New York. This, bar the crucial one who in his ordinariness smashes the apple cart, is Conlon's decidedly ordinary cast.
Because Fergal is the community's "single man" and away, the others correspond with him regularly. It is this correspondence which makes up the bulk of the novel. The characters' raisons d'etres are provided by brief stretches of Helena's narration or, more accurately, character sketches. Helena is a particularly apt and objective observer of these individuals since, as she admits herself, her career has led her to "lose the perspective of people as people: everyone is simply a passenger . . .". Viewing her neighbours in this way, she is in a position to know more about them than they know about themselves in their turbulent flight through life. Helena is at once dispassionate and loving towards the members of her community, particularly towards Connie, the one who would seem at first blush to be closest to canonisation.
Catherine Dunne's more conservatively structured A Name for Himself revolves around a character quite similar in some ways to Conlon's Fergal. Named after his abusive father, Vinny Farrell grows up in a loveless and violent home. He has to shoulder adult responsibilities at a too young age and, despite his best efforts to keep his siblings together after the premature death of his mother, he has his first taste of failure when the social services arrive to disperse the brood. Thereafter known only as Farrell, this fastidious young man serves his four-year apprenticeship under Mr Casey and becomes a respected craftsmen.
Employed by one detestable, but very ordinary Mr P.J. Browne to assist in the renovation (or, as Farrell sees it, the destruction) of a large Georgian House on Merrion Square, Farrell immediately takes umbrage at his employer, but soon after falls inexorably in love with Browne's daughter, Grace. The pair go about setting up house, but from the start their attempts at normality are doomed. P.J. is too much of a bastard; the pressure on the young lovers is too much. The relationship spirals into psychotic despair.
Dunne's traditional third-person narrative is an apt vehicle for character development. Both Farrell and Grace are persuasive and memorable. In this respect, Dunne's traditionalism serves her marginally better than Conlon's constant volleying between narrative and epistle. Both of these novels are levelling experiences, for they highlight the exceptional and unfathomable depths of what we nonchalantly dismiss as the ordinary, the normal, the everyday. In the deft hands of Conlon and Dunne, the ordinary becomes story-worthy.
Ellen Beardsley is a writer and a critic and a tutor of English at University College, Cork