At the end of Mary Gaitskill’s 1988 story “Secretary”, the narrator recalls a psychiatrist asking her: “Debby, do you ever have the sensation of being outside yourself, almost as if you can actually watch yourself from another place?” It’s a question that pretty much every lead character in Irish writer Nicole Flattery’s debut story collection could answer “yes” to.
Like Gaitskill, Flattery’s dominant interest is in people who are deeply estranged not just from their surroundings – they are isolated even in crowded rooms, and the ones in relationships are the most isolated of all – but from themselves, too. In the excellent “Track”, which won the 2017 White Review short story prize, a woman is dating a famous but fading comedian who calls her “an odd little ghost person”, and eventually abandons her each night to listen to a recording of audience laughter because canned adulation is preferable to dealing with an actual, unpredictable human. “Tell me one opinion you have,” he challenges her as their relationship disintegrates, having treated her throughout as little more than a gofer or dress-up doll. If she doesn’t have opinions, or won’t express them publicly – except via anonymous online posts – it’s because the world she encounters clearly isn’t interested in the kind that belong to a young woman.
Flattery has said she writes about “young women searching for meaning they might never find”. They walk around “abandoning sentences”, lie unmoving for hours on bathroom floors, attend university but can’t remember what they are studying, or where they are from. One of them cries “loudly, not knowing herself if they were fake or real tears”, while for another even “getting dressed had become a source of confusion”. Flattery knows how to mine these emotional states for humour (this is a very funny book) without diluting their pathos (it’s a very sad book, too).
At its best, which is often, Flattery’s prose has a thrilling relentlessness and rhythmical snap to it; it pummels and excites. Here is Lucy from “Abortion, a Love Story”, who is simultaneously having a holiday and a breakdown:
The place was made entirely of concrete, a tower of grey tracing the sky with a half glimpse of the sea available from every room. She threw down her remaining credit card. She was giving herself a week. It was a cement shithole and she felt at home.
As is the case with many of the settings in these stories, the hotel is at the same time a physical space and an external projection of inner turmoil:
In the corridor and in the lift to her room, she saw some of the other lost souls; their faces creased, their lives out of control. They all carried the same look of exhaustion. The women wore bikinis as uniform. She saluted them and their secrets, their hidden illnesses, their scars, the strings that disappeared into their flesh, every decision that led them here …
When Lucy meets theatre student Natasha their lives are falling apart, and you’re glad they have found each other. But the story, at more than 60 pages the longest in the collection, continues beyond what seems its natural endpoint. There must be a reason why Flattery devotes more than 20 pages to an exhausting scene-by-scene description of the first (and last) night of Natasha and Lucy’s “bad” play (the judgment is Natasha’s) – she isn’t the sort of writer who wouldn’t have a reason – but I’m not sure what it is. “I don’t know if I get it,” Lucy says at the play’s close, and in that moment it’s hard to tell if Flattery is being aggressive or apologetic towards her readers.
Although they deal largely with disordered thought, disappointment, the failure to connect and pain, the arc of many of these stories is not as grim as you might think. “When I left him,” one ends, “I felt a happy relief.” The sense remains, though, as in the stories and novels of Jean Rhys, that the mistakes we have witnessed are likely to be repeated.
This is less true for Angela in the closing story, “Not the End Yet”, but only because the world is ending, taking her ability to make bad decisions with it. Even in the end times Angela continues putting herself through excruciating dates in a restaurant that grows less staffed and provisioned with each visit. In the final scene she takes a sports car for a test drive: “Yes, Angela thought, as she exited the car dealership, that’s smooth.” The moment counterbalances one from the final pages of the first story, in which the narrator describes “becoming a resigned passenger in cars that traversed the motorway”. Both of these women are at once travelling away from and into disaster, but one of them, at least, is in the driver’s seat.