Well, that was quite a journey we’ve been on these last few weeks with our latest Book Club author Mary Costello, literally in the sense that she took us first to New York, where Academy Street is set and where she spent a summer writing, and also closer to home on the motorway from Dublin to Galway, where she revealed that she does a lot of her best thinking and scribbling.
We’ve published a lot of material by and about Mary, but we don’t claim to be the sole repository of wisdom on the subject, so here to round things off is a seelction of extracts from reviews and interviews published elsewhere with hyperlinks to the original articles. You’re very welcome.
On Monday, we’ll be announcing the name of the author and novel that we have lined up to be the next Irish Times Book Club choice. Thanks for reading – please read on.
Johanna Lane, author of Black Lake, interviewed Mary for the Electric Literature website last month and they discussed emigration, the Irish in New York, JM Coetzee, and the different demands of a short story and a novel.
Oneof the most interesting questions Joanna asks is this: how do you understand the concept of tone? How does it affect your work and your response to the work of others?
Mary replies: “I think of tone as a kind of force field around the character that has agency over the narrative. I find it difficult to talk about tone without referring to character and voice. In the case of Tess, there’s an air of quiet trepidation attached to the way she lives. I had to convey this trepidation, this quietude, in language that is apt for her. The way she thinks and moves and has her being needed to be reflected in the language and syntax – and in the point of view, too. Without ever deciding, I employed close third person point-of-view, so the tone that emerged is intimate.
“Getting the tone right is very important. It’s not something that can be forced or rushed – it seems to come almost involuntarily. And it can be easily lost too. At times during the writing of the novel I felt it slipping and I grew very anxious. But there was nothing to be done – except step away and wait. Without the right tone, the writing always feels false.”
Read the full interview here.
Reviewing Academy Street for the Guardian last October, Sinéad Gleeson of this parish wrote: "Costello's writing is so controlled and convincing. She captures with great acuity the complex inner world that makes Tess both withdrawn and desperate to experience life. The city pulses, and as Tess strives for meaning, her interiority and melancholy recall Maeve Brennan's wonderful writing about New York. Academy Street also brings to mind John Williams's resurrected masterpiece, Stoner. Both novels ask what constitutes a worthy contribution to the world, and in offering us seemingly unremarkable lives, give us extraordinarily compelling narratives."
Read the full review here.
Belinda McKeon in the New York Times notes the "spareness and precision of her sentences", the way she "moves with a light step across the years" and that the author "deepens and magnifies the distinctive style evident in her 2012 collection The China Factory", but issues a caveat:
“To immerse the narrative of a short story in the interiority of a lonely and wounded character is one thing, but the stretch of a novel is more demanding terrain, and Academy Street leans heavily on the offered profundity of tragedy (from the central to the incidental, many moments are glutted with death and abandonment) to push Tess to peaks of emotional insight. These begin to feel repetitive even far in advance of the novel’s climax.”
Read the full review here.
Ronnie Scott in the Australian observed: "In Academy Street, she has hammered her writing — deceptively simple, tonally flat — into a dark, strong book. To call it restrained is to understate both the turbulence buried within the novel and the control with which it's conveyed."
He makes an interesting observation about the author’s handling of time passing: “Academy Street covers a great deal of time — nearly a lifetime, in fact — but is never overwhelmed by its scope. Half the fun is seeing what Costello will choose to focus on and what she’ll choose to elide ... For the most part, the handling of time is fluid and cumulatively devastating. Perhaps the point is to show, in unfussy terms, how quickly things can be lost and how little choice we have in deciding the parts that stubbornly stay.”
Read the full review here.
Kirkus found it "darkly beautiful", concluding "Costello renders her homely, knowing heroine with craft and compassion in this sad, slim, rich novel".
Read the full review here.
Katherine A Powers for Barnes & Noble homes in on the handlingof tme but also on the spiritual yearning and religious imagery that permeate the text, but her conclusion is also hugely positive.
“Its excellence lies not so much in where it ends up, though that is powerful enough and has resonance with James Joyce’s The Dead, that most perfect expression of Ireland’s obsession with death, goneness, and memory. But what is so unusually fine is the short novel’s persuasive momentum and the economy and precision with which its author has selected and portrayed the points which delineate and plumb the life of one woman.”
Read the full review here.
For the San Francisco Chronicle, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes: "A beautifully understated and painfully wrought account of one woman's unremarkable, melancholy existence, Costello's book inevitably draws comparisons to early Joyce or Colm Tóibín, but there is also something of the strange and hypnotic beauty of a single life span, compressed in its entirety and recounted matter-of-factly, that recalls Roberto Bolaño's lengthy short story Anne Moore's Life, in these pages."
Read the full review here.
JP O'Malley for the Toronto Star is equally enthusiastic, albeit with a not eof caution.
“Academy Street is Costello’s first attempt to break into the novel form. And yet, she cannot seem to escape the defining traits of the short story genre with its extreme loneliness, isolation and a sturdy cadence that moves so strictly, it almost feels as tightly woven as a poem that’s tightly conforming to the iambic pentameter meter.
“Many readers may find, in parts, this rigidity slightly taxing at times.
“But those who take pleasure in this lyrical form of writing — which really is exceptional in parts — will have no problem accepting this hybrid form which sits comfortably at a halfway point between the novel and the short story.
“For a debut novel, this is an exceptional piece of work.”
Read the full review here.
We would love to hear your thoughts. Please add them in the comments feel below.
