A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

*Some Spoilers Below*
*CW: Rape, Child Abuse* 

I struggled with this book. Oh, how I struggled with this book. You see, this is one of those self-consciously "literary" books that, when you're just not enjoying reading, seem to carry with them a sneer of "well, you just didn't understand." It was a big book a few years ago. It's trying to be Joyce and Beckett, and the writing is stream-of-consciousness jagged and not coherent. It's also a slog, ugly, mean, and as one review I read put it, it felt like the book wanted to punish the reader for having the temerity to continue.

And yet, there are the accolades. People praising it to the sky as the next big thing, a stark look at reality, and I end up wondering if I'm just too squeamish for "realism." If I want a prettier world and push away the difficult. But then, that's bullshit. I like difficult books, even books where difficult things happen - but not when it's just there to be misery porn. If this were a genre book, I'd call it the grimiest of grimdark. Grimdark has been rightly called out for pretending that horrible = real, whereas anything with hope or love or friendship is somehow fluffy and unrealistic. That is not generally the way the world works. There are difficulties. There are kindnesses too.

Let's take this in two parts - what happens in this book, and how it is expressed. For the first part, there are some things that I can absolutely see happening - turning to physical vices to cope with the pain of the terminal illness of a family member. Yup, no problem. It gets dwelt on a lot, and we get a lot of detail, and for good measure, the ongoing sexual relationship between the main character and her uncle. I am not, oh I am not, denying that such things happen in real life, nor am I saying that they can't be written about. But I am very picky in how such things are written about, and this is just one more horrible brick in a load of horrible bricks that make a horrible wall, and there's nothing more to it. There's nothing I'm seeing McBride say here that goes beyond the litany of misery.

I mean, when you have the main character raped twice (once by a stranger, once by a family member) on the day of her brother's funeral, I think we can safely say we've gone beyond realism. And if it's not trying to be realism, what is it trying to be? It's not a faithful reconstruction of the world as it is. It's not a literary evocation of the universality of women's experiences. I'm just not sure what it is.

So let's talk about how it is expressed. Most of the writing about this books talks about how it's a new version of James Joyce. (One perplexing blurb said that this was Joyce with an Irish lilt, which would be...Joyce?) And yeah, maybe. I mean I haven't read Finnegan's Wake, but I have read Ulysses, and I suppose you could make some comparison to the stream of consciousness thing, but Joyce flows differently. This is so very choppy. Then I read an article that talked about McBride being blown away by Beckett, and it clicked. Yes, this is very, very much like the Beckett I read and didn't like: How It Is. They're similar both in writing style, and in content.

Writing that review was very much like writing this one - struggling with feeling incompetent because I didn't like the book (am I missing it entirely or is this legitimately an Emperor's New Clothes situation?) and feeling put off by the sheer cynicism and pessimism of what's going on. The writing style is similar, and Beckett is trying less to capture something about life than he is about misery and it's not realistic, and it all clicked. This is so close to Beckett it's less an homage and more borrowing a voice.

So, yeah. If you've read and loved some of Beckett's more obscure work, the stuff that's really out there, then yes, you might enjoy A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing. But I didn't like either one, and this is definitely a style or its own little genre that is not for me.