Popular Fiction: Chick-lit is a derogatory label, sometimes used by those who believe that a work of women's "commercial" fiction is little more than a style statement on a par with a new lipstick. Literature, according to this argument, must be difficult, dark and dour. Literary novels must have sad or ambiguous endings, while commercial novels should have redemptive, upbeat ones, writes Kate Holmquist
Marian Keyes has wisely disregarded the rules and followed her own voice. Her eighth novel, Anybody Out There?, is her best work yet, showing Keyes as a virtuoso who can deftly mix dark and light, tragic and comic in a way that only a handful of writers can. Roddy Doyle springs to mind as another Irish novelist who, like Keyes, uses laughter to erode the reader's defences on the journey into dark territory, thus making the underlying tragedy of the story seem all the more real.
A seasoned writer, Keyes's latest work reads easily, yet her complex balance of tone and character is actually extremely difficult to achieve.
And her choice of theme in Anybody Out There? - bereavement and the recovery process - is a challenging one which in conventional hands wouldn't be humourous. Keyes's unique talent is to inspire laughter and tears, allowing opposite emotions to mix just as they do in real life. As at a good funeral, laughter pierces the grief, without diminishing it. That's the balance Keyes strikes in her seemingly effortless first-person narrative.
Anybody Out There? is the fourth in Keyes's series about the five Walsh sisters and their matriarch, Mammy Walsh. In Watermelon, Claire was ultimately liberated through her husband's cruel act of abandonment, in Rachel's Holiday, Rachel was emotionally disemboweled by rehab and in Angels, Maggie - the "white sheep" of the family - saw her perfectly controlled life combust.
Each of these is a "recovery" novel, as the sisters face the challenges of self-transformation wrought by life-changing loss. Anybody Out There? is in some ways a companion book to Rachel's Holiday, giving us the wisdom that Rachel has gained a decade later, but through Anna's experience. There are parallels between grieving the loss of the ego, through addiction, and grieving the loss of a lover, which Keyes intelligently highlights without being heavy-handed. This theme is first signalled when Anna's journey begins with the spectre of addiction hanging over her, as she lies in Mammy Walsh's Good Front Room, resisting the temptation to smother her grief with the pharmaceuticals Mammy Walsh is doling out.
We aren't told how Anna came to be lying battered and broken on Mammy's sofa bed, only that something terrible has happened involving Aidan, the man she fell in love with in New York. We know that Anna feels to blame , and that Aidan's name is never uttered by Mammy Walsh. Is he a wife-beater? A drug dealer? Anna's mother and the fifth sister, Helen, a freelance detective who hides in hedges spying on unfaithful spouses, are too absorbed in their own drama to ask the pertinent questions. A sign of Keyes's artistry is that Aidan remains elusive for nearly 150 pages, so that the circumstances of Anna's hurt sink in slowly, making the eventual revelation of Aidan's fate all the more heart-breaking.
As Anna struggles with the physical and spiritual pain of "mourning sickness", she heads back to New York - where Rachel, now an addiction counsellor, is about to marry the most attractive man alive - and resumes her career as a PR for "Candy Girl", a line of edgy, urban cosmetics. Keyes's cutting satire of a business that offers women emotional sustenence through make-up and skincare, makes the case that the beauty industry belittles female emotion. The contrast between the superficiality of the beauty business and the profound process of grieving that Anna must privately endure accentuates her alienation.
If Keyes were following the conventional rules, a character like Anna, with her bizarre dress sense and wacky career, would not be allowed to have something truly awful happen to her and she certainly wouldn't travel as deeply as she does into the dark - gaining insight that will stay with the reader long afterwards.
Kate Holmquist is an Irish Times journalist. Her novel The Glass Room will be published by Penguin Ireland in August
Anybody Out There? By Marian Keyes Poolbeg, 593pp €14.99