A typical adolescent, Jack Fristensky is consumed by uncertainty about who he is, his place in the world and, of course, his burgeoning sexuality. Less typically, he must also contend with his mother’s suicide and his father’s subsequent admission to a mental hospital. Effectively orphaned, he is sent to live with his mother’s ‘mad, mysterious family’ – his grandparents, Aunt Rose and three uncles, Theo, Haulie and JJ, the last of whom is only two years his senior.
All the characters are richly and idiosyncratically drawn. But whereas, in previous novels, from his earliest, The Spinning Heart, to the most recent, Heart, Be at Peace, the award-winning Irish author Donal Ryan has specialised in multiple viewpoints, here his third-person narrative exclusively inhabits Jack’s consciousness. The writing, particularly in the early childhood section, recalls James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Jack feels forever at the mercy of forces beyond his control. In his parents’ house, he is aware of significant conversations that ‘he couldn’t quite catch from the living room’, and of ‘nights of muffled shouts and cries from down the hall’, which, in retrospect, may offer clues to his mother’s distress. In his grandparents’ house, where the mysteries proliferate, ‘he’s like an old transistor with a broken dial that tunes itself by accident now and again to the right wavelength’.
The deepest mysteries predate his birth. What lies behind the ‘bad blood’ that existed between his uncles and his father? Is it simply, as a censorious aunt maintains, that the Slovakian Tomas was ‘a bad spirit’ who ‘came along and nabbed our perfect Grace’, or is there something darker, something that anticipates the ‘incestuous lust’ that Jack himself comes to feel for Rose?
Ryan offers a vivid and engaging account of Jack’s life in the bustling rural household: his admiration for his two middle-aged uncles, whose relentless bickering belies their mutual devotion; his fractious relationship with the truculent JJ, who jealously interrupts his first kiss with the German Leyla, ‘a proper teenage girl with blonde hair and beautiful moopsies’.
The family portrait, however, proves more compelling than Jack’s climactic epiphany, in which he abruptly appears to unravel the complex web of past relationships before descending into a madness reminiscent of his father’s. Rather than a questioning protagonist, whose confusions we share, he becomes a psychotic one, whose conclusions we distrust.
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