The first 19 pages of The Heart of Everything unfold with a quiet, steady and extraordinary power, to be felt in the very first line: “She was doing lists way before Mr Whatshisname ever told her to.” These pages introduce us to Mags/Margaret Jensen and allow us to eavesdrop on her most private thoughts, her secret fears, and her various coping strategies such as the compiling of lists which are also a “roll of shame”. On page 19, Margaret Jensen “locks her front door behind her and takes herself away” and, as we read on, we are less and less sure if she’ll return. Instead, we meet her three children.
Raymond is a one-time TV star and now Cork librarian, whose “occupational hazards” include the mental alphabetisation of beer taps and withstanding the confidences from “everyone he meets” who assume he wants to hear what they’re reading. Elin, the youngest child, is the author of children’s books featuring Neep and Nucho, who prides herself in “being completely honest with children” in her books and survives through deep dishonesty in her own life. And Anita is the unenviable oldest child, whose philosophy is best encapsulated in the hard-won single belief that “not paying enough attention to small things is what causes the boulders to roll in your direction”.
McKervey’s book is a wickedly perceptive novel about siblings, and has led me to muse – in one of my job’s occupational hazards – as to the rarity of good fictional treatments of sibling relations, in particular those, as is the skill of The Heart of Everything, which render the precise detail of sibling dysfunction. Some candidates, in alphabetical order of course: A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley); Sonny’s Blues (James Baldwin); The Green Road (Anne Enright). Suggestions welcome!
And I’m reminded of a comment by a late friend who, when in the mid-1980s the term “dysfunctional family” was all the rage, was heard to remark: “for goodness sake, have you ever seen one that functioned?”
The Jensen siblings have to undertake a search for their missing mother and most of the novel is concerned with that search, during which we as eager onlookers (and what is more fascinating than other families’ problems?) get to trace what has been lost long before in this particular family. But The Heart of Everything is also tender and moving in its unflinching depiction of family roles and how they function. This isn’t the Waltons or even the Simpsons (though there is one son and two daughters) and what we read is an anatomy of one family’s innards.
To give some examples, this is McKervey on Raymond:
“It was as though their family was modelled on an inefficient public service and through a quirk of the system, Ray, by virtue of being male and there, found himself promoted to chief executive officer.” (p154)
And some pages later, this is Elin’s view on her brother and what they share:
“Elin’s memories of her childhood are so tied up with her brother that it’s hard to imagine his aren’t the match for them. Of course they weren’t always together, far from it. But Ray has a starring role in pretty much all of the memories she dusts down, and cares for, and keeps faith with. She no longer has an adult life in common with her brother, no day-to-day currency to squander or save. But surely their past is lodged in a joint account. It has to be, doesn’t it? Because if it’s not, then it’s spent for ever, slipped like water through her careless fingers.” (p.158)
And a little later, back to Ray with this wonderfully unsentimental line: “Anyway, right now if it was a choice being drinking in a toilet or being with his sisters, he’d take his chances in the jacks.” (p176).
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The secrets of this family are gradually laid bare. If this is a novel about loss of memory (and it memorably is), it’s also a novel about the excess of memory, of family members marked by too much remembering. We come to know the full details of a tragic accident which has detonated family relations, and although we’ve guessed some of the details (no plot spoiler), reading that chapter is like watching a scary film unfold through your fingers. And we can recognise the consequences of that devastating loss in the siblings’ coping mechanisms. To give just one of many examples of this – and of McKervey’s keen use of metaphor – here’s the description of Anita and Derek’s marriage as an escalator in a vast shopping centre, “two lines stretching out, rising side by side to the top of the building. Interdependent yet completely separate” (p271).
Reading this novel, I was reminded more than once of Raymond Carver’s comments on the art of writing, of how, through the use of “commonplace but precise language”, “commonplace things and objects” can be endowed with “immense, even startling power”. Carver’s examples include a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring; the same effect is masterfully achieved by McKervey through the details of a neighbour’s Christmas lights or witnessing a stranger’s quiet tears.
And thankfully there is much humour too: be it “Dev’s cupboard” in the Jensen house, or the generational changes in the reading of Maeve Binchy’s novels, from books swapped under the desk at school, in Anita’s time, to her daughters’ struggles with the homework assignment on Circle of Friends (that curious destiny of the Irish writer: to feature on the Leaving Cert course).
More seriously, and returning to the search for Mags Jensen, its details are vividly and compellingly rendered, including unexpected and apparently commonplace things. There’s wonderful detail here about the people whom the searchers encounter in one housing estate: the exhausted man and his small children; the lonely woman with a chair lift. And when Elin begins to see the connections between people and to muse on alternative ways of being (what if the kids got to play with that chair lift?), it’s tempting to see this as a metonym for McKervey at work, with her very special eye for connections. So it is Liz, the outsider, who can offer the most truthful of insights regarding a parent afflicted with dementia: “We weren’t looking. That was the problem. All we could see was the version of him we were used to.” And then, when one does look, “it was like watching him leaving himself bit by bit over seven years, until an outline of him was all that was left” (p123).
I won’t say if you see Mags Jensen again; just to warn this is not a novel with a sentimental ending. It continues – velvet gloved – to “put it up” to us, its readers, even in the last pages, but it is also quietly redemptive. In the comments on the back cover, Frank McGuinness rightly termed The Heart of Everything a “wise” novel and I would add “a deeply generous” one. It’s also a very helpful novel for many of us with family members who are negotiating the particular challenge which afflicts Mags Jensen. Through the siblings Raymond, Anita, Elin and other characters, we are led to observe differently what we thought we understood; we’re guided gently but precisely to imagine otherwise. These are the greatest and truest acts of fiction, or, to echo Éilís Ni Dhuibhne’s review, the “hallmarks of the true novelist”.
Prof Margaret Kelleher is Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, University College Dublin
The Heart of Everything by Henrietta McKervey is published by Hachette Books Ireland, £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount on Irish Times Book Club titles. Throughout May, we will publish a series of articles by the author, fellow writers and readers exploring the novel, culminating in a podcast to be recorded at the Irish Writers Centre on Thursday, May 26th, at 7.30pm, and published here on May 31st.
