When we meet Deirdre MacEntee at the start of Kathleen MacMahon’s second novel, she’s approaching her 80th birthday and is planning her own death. A former Abbey actress, Deirdre is the melodramatic matriarch of the MacEntee family, and she has decided to gather her family around her to share the news that she plans to shuffle off this mortal coil while she’s still in relatively good health.
But by the time Deirdre’s birthday rolls around, the MacEntees’ lives will have been turned upside down. First Deirdre’s eldest daughter, Alma, a famous broadcaster and columnist, is attacked in her home by an intruder, who cuts off several of her fingers in order to steal her rings. Then Alma’s ex-husband, Mick, a former Fianna Fáil TD who is now Ireland’s European Commissioner in Brussels, is filmed stealing a pepper grinder from a Brussels restaurant and becomes a national laughing stock.
Alma’s sister Acushla is married to Mick’s brother Liam, also a former FF TD who lost his seat in the last election and is currently planning a comeback. But it’s clear that Alma and Mick, despite their divorce, still get on better than Liam and Acushla. And when Acushla publicly reveals that years ago she had an abortion following a diagnosis of a fatal foetal abnormality, the couple’s already shaky relationship becomes even more unstable.
More troubles
The rest of the family have troubles of their own. Deirdre’s ex-husband, Manus, a celebrated author, left her decades earlier for a younger man called Sam; after years of domestic bliss, Sam is now suffering from early-onset dementia. Deirdre and Manus’s reclusive youngest child, Macdara, who never really recovered from a youthful breakdown, lives with his mother. Meanwhile Alma’s daughter Nora has just returned from an Israeli jail after going on an aid ship to Gaza, and Acushla’s daughter Connie, the mother of young twins, just craves a good night’s sleep.
The Long Hot Summer is essentially a series of character studies placed in chronological order over the course of summer 2013, studies that work together to create a single picture of a memorable family. As the book moves from one person to the next, we see each member of the extended MacAntee family both as they see themselves and as they see each other. MacMahon's gift for capturing a personality is acute; Alma in particular is described so vividly that within just a few pages you feel as if she's been on your radio and television for years.
Family dynamics
The dynamics between the various family members and their spouses are also sensitively and convincingly drawn. They think they know each other intimately, but in some cases it turns out they didn’t know each other at all. They fundamentally love each other, but that love can feel like a straightjacket. But as Connie reminds Nora, the one member who seems to have strayed furthest from the family’s south Dublin world, “whether you like it or not, this is always going to be your home.”
This focus on the characters and their relationships does, however, mean that the story feels underdeveloped. Initially it seems as though Acushla's abortion and the implications of its revelation are going to be explored in some depth, but it never really goes anywhere. And Deirdre's plans are wrapped up in a way that borders on the trite. But The Long Hot Summer still has just enough narrative drive to keep the reader interested in the MacEntees' story, as they negotiate tragedy, betrayal and unexpected happiness, and discover that "what there is, despite everything, is love."
Anna Carey's latest young-adult novel is Rebecca Is Always Right ( O'Brien Press)
