In spare, evocative prose, Mary Costello traces the life of her protagonist, Tess Lohan, from her childhood in Ireland through decades of her life in New York, and from a school-going child with a large clutch of siblings to a profoundly lonely existence in later life.
It is 1944, Tess is seven, and her mother has just died.
The stairs sweep up and turn to the right and it is here on the turn, by the stained-glass window, that her uncle’s back comes into view. Light is streaming in. Her heart starts to beat fast. She sees the back of a neighbour, Tommy Burns, and then her other uncle, struggling. And then she understands. At the exact moment she sees the coffin, she understands.
Her father, always remote, is distraught, angry and bitter, and has no time to fuss over how their mother’s loss affects the children. Tess is left alone with her intense imagination and her scary dreams, and another death in the area, of a girl about her own age, sends her into a spasm of silence that lasts several months.
‘What’s wrong with you — why don’t you answer me?’ Evelyn asks her. I did answer you, she replies. I’m not hungry. But then, after a few more answers, she knows they have not heard her. Her words are not working, the sounds are not coming out of her mouth into the air.
This event is an overt premonition of things to come: all her life, Tess will be bottled-up and repressed, and will struggle to find the words for any situation. And yet, under the surface, her feelings are intense.
One might think that having six siblings would leave very little room for loneliness. But her solitary internal childhood life too is a foreshadowing of Tess’ life to come.
Tess’ favourite sister Claire is invited by Aunt Molly to come to New York, and Tess starts nursing training in Dublin. Claire marries and moves out of Aunt Molly’s, and invites Tess to move to New York and take her place (the ‘chain migration’ that has been described with such contempt lately, but only when done by brown or black people). And thus begins the second phase of Tess’ life.
A fumbled sexual initiation ends with the man going to Vietnam (1965), and Tess discovers she is pregnant.
She had known from the start — amid the confusion of shame and fear she had expected this too, and now it was almost a relief to be right. To know the worst had come, and the wait was over. In those first nights she had lain awake visualizing the swim: the millions of spawning sperm racing upstream inside her, and her mountain of eggs — her twenty-five years stockpile of ova — waiting to receive them. She said the word aloud, impregnate.
She agonizes :
Night after night, she contemplated her options. She ventured down avenues that frightened and sickened her.
In a small apartment in Academy Street, uptown Manhattan, she brings up her son Theo, meets and grows close to her only friend Willa. She works, watches Theo grow from happy child into sulky adolescent and beyond. She asks and expects very little of the world.
This quiet, delicate book is imbued with melancholy, there’s no two ways about it. That mournfulness might turn off some readers, especially with the tragedy in the last third of the novel. Hasn’t life thrown enough at Tess already? But there is strength and beauty in Tess’ dignity and determination, in her clear-eyed and unsentimental approach to reality, and in Costello’s writing.
The things she had hankered after — encounters with beauty, love, sometimes the numinous — she found in books. She flinched from the ugly, the vulgar, but never from suffering or the pain of shame, discerning in the author’s soul a striving to transcend these states, to draw out of injury or anguish some revelation, some insight, that would deliver both character and reader into a new state of grace.
There are many novels, memoirs and biographies about the Irish-American immigrant experience in New York. Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn comes to mind, of course, as a novel about a young woman who grows up in Ireland and moves to New York City. Brooklyn and Academy Street both say a lot in very little space, and both follow women who remain outsiders in their new lives, never fully at home. Toibin’s writing is exquisite, delicately examining his protagonist’s emotions in unadorned prose. Costello, too, writes graceful and elegant sentences, but has chosen to follow the entire life of her protagonist, as opposed to a few years in Brooklyn. Toibin’s Eilish can be lonely, but is not withdrawn; she could slip easily back into life in Ireland or find friends in New York. Costello’s Tess is a study in introverted loneliness that defines her entire life even without the heartbreaking events that caused the loss of her mother, her sister, her brother, her son’s father, and more.
Mary Costello covers seven decades of Tess’ life in a mere 143 pages. It seems only appropriate that this review should also be concise.
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