Fiction: Marsha Swan's debut novel, Dirty Sky, is a lesson to other first-time authors.
Self-published under her Hag's Head imprint, it boasts superlative production values and an unusual format: almost square, with a matte black cover studded with snapshots and a rough sketch, it tempts the browser on first sight. A quick flick through its pages reveals sub-chapters named for their central figures (Maggie, Sally, Ed, Maggie, Jim, Maggie, Sally, and so on), interleaved with peculiarly unremarkable black-and-white photographs. It is, in short, intriguing, and Swan should have some success with it on this level alone.
Faulknerian in its approach to storytelling, the imbricated perspectives of Dirty Sky chart the young lives of four children in a slaughterhouse town in the American Midwest. The initial chapters showcase the author's talent for replicating the insistent, restless patter of small children, as they chatter around the crux of a story, barely touching upon salient details, unable as they are to understand fully their implications. The reader later understands childhood events in the context of the characters' grim teenage years.
Anthony Trollope once remarked that "suburban misery is as hideous as it is pitiable". Swan, hailing from a "Smalltown, Iowa" herself, is impassive as she describes the fast-food jobs, hallucinogenic cough remedies, abortions and drug deals which comprise the misspent youths of these less fortunate suburbanites. As their lives are contrasted with the local high school's "success stories", it emerges as questionable whether marriage at 19 and 2.4 kids in a town with no future is really an improvement on the fate of Maggie, Sally, Jim and Ed - for all walks of life here are equally trapped.
An editor with a publishing house in her daily working life, Swan has the experience to put together an attractive, artistic package with this debut work. It is a capable and solid first novel suggesting enormous creative potential.
Nora Mahony is a writer and critic
Dirty Sky By Marsha Swan Hag's Head Press, 192pp. €12.99