BEAUTIFUL REVIEW OF JOYRIDE TO JUPITER

Des Breen has written a beautiful review of Joyride to Jupiter for the Irish Examiner. Truly delighted with it.

JOYRIDE VIRTUAL TOUR - stop #3

My virtual tour continues with a fab review from Cathy Brown at 746 Books here.

'Joyride to Jupiter is a collection that shows a writer with complete mastery of her craft. The best of the stories hint rather than shout but all are poignant and complex, riding on the dichotomy between hope and despair. She is clear-eyed when exploring the dark realities of human behaviour, but the humour and wit displayed within her affecting prose allow this collection to soar.' Cathy Brown

IRISH INDO REVIEW OF *JOYRIDE*

Lovely review of Joyride to Jupiter in the Irish Independent today from Tanya Sweeney. Thanks so much to her.

EVENING ECHO REVIEW OF JOYRIDE TO JUPITER

IRISH TIMES REVIEW - JOYRIDE TO JUPITER

Another cracker of a review for Joyride to Jupiter, this time from Houman Barekat in today's Irish Times. Delighted with it!
'This blending of wry, caustic irreverence and meditative poignancy is central to the success of O’Connor’s storytelling. The mix is just right: the internal monologues are exactly as long as they need to be; the humour is well-timed and effective. The dramatic moments, of which there are a fair few ... are rendered with unobtrusive deftness.' Meep!

Full text of the review:

Joyride to Jupiter review: a collection of skilfully crafted fictions

Houman Barekat

It is often said that smells can evoke memories more powerfully than sights or sounds. They crop up time and again in Nuala O’Connor’s short story collection, Joyride to Jupiter: the stench of fish guts on a quayside, the sour tang of hotel bedrooms, the soapy odour of an older couple’s bedroom, the mildewy pong of damp-ridden lodgings, the passing whiff of a familiar perfume. The protagonist of one story, Futuretense, writes marketing copy for fragrances. Her reflections on the suicide of her beloved brother, whose scent she helped him choose as a child, are interspersed with corny product blurbs, pointedly juxtaposing personal introspection with the vapid gibberish of commercial puff.

Many of these 19 stories – whose settings range from Dublin and obscure Co Mayo villages to Naples and the Copacabana – are concerned with loss or absence. Room 313 is about a Ukrainian cleaner who only gets to see her young daughter via Skype, while Squidinky tells of a tattooist grieving for her partner: “I am lonely, it’s true, but it’s more more that – I’m alone.” This melancholic timbre is animated by bursts of ironic wit and sprinklings of bawdy humour.

Affairs and infidelities abound. The narrator of Consolata catches her father having sex with a nun (“As I approached I heard a moist slap-slap . . .) and is compelled to keep quiet about it. In Mayo Oh Mayo, a young Irishwoman’s feelings for her American lover dissipate into indifferent contempt, concluding that “there is no getting to the bottom of the man because there are no depths to flounder in”. In Napoli Abú a jaded singleton speaks of her regret at having diminished the frisson of her affair with a married man by googling his wife.

O’Connor does a fine line in unsympathetic narrators who fire off withering put-downs with provocative insouciance. The narrator of The Donor, for example, describes a woman as having “a reality TV face; one of those faces that drips tears when her dough fails to prove, or her house mates vote her out”. Xavier, a sperm donor, is surreptitiously scoping out his biological son by befriending his mother.

At the start of this dubious undertaking he is flush with the optimism and misplaced paternal zeal, but his enthusiasm soon gives way to disappointment and disgust, to the point that the sight of the boy playing with his dog is described thus: “Ludo hunkered down and began to talk absolute shite to the mutt . . .” The narration here is in the third person, but it internalises Xavier’s perspective in a breezily scathing indirect speech.

In Tinnycross, a pair of estranged brothers squabble over their inheritance following the deaths of their parents. Revisiting his rural childhood home elicits, in one of them, a pang of nostalgia for “that precious, pellucid place of scant worldly pain”. He wonders: “Is it possible . . . to be in love with a field? . . . And if it is possible, is it wise?”

In the volume’s title story, the narrator’s dementia-stricken wife regresses to child-like capriciousness: she takes to wearing a tracksuit and buys a garish teeny eyeshadow called Joyride to Jupiter; when her daughter scoffs at this, she gives her a slap.

Both of these tales brim with wistful affection and human warmth. O’Connor moves seamlessly from this to a jovially sardonic portrait of coupledom in Penny and Leo Married Bliss, whose narrator has just trashed her errant boyfriend’s laptop in elaborate fashion (“I knew he was watching that auld porno and I was having none of it”) and is idly pining after the local priest: “God forgive me but I’d bounce up and down on Father Hugh Boylan all night, given a chance.”

This blending of wry, caustic irreverence and meditative poignancy is central to the success of O’Connor’s storytelling. The mix is just right: the internal monologues are exactly as long as they need to be; the humour is well-timed and effective. The dramatic moments, of which there are a fair few – including an illicit lesbian dalliance and the murder of a would-be paedophile by his wife – are rendered with unobtrusive deftness.

O’Connor’s fourth novel is due out in 2018; if these skilfully crafted fictions are anything to go by, it will be one to look out for.

SUNDAY TIMES REVIEW - JOYRIDE TO JUPITER

Louisa Carroll in The Sunday Times reviewed my book alongside June Caldwell's début short story collection today. Here is the full text of it below. I'm pleased as a dog with two pockets :)

*

Love affair continues with the short story

Reviews by Louisa Carroll

June 4 2017, 12:00am, The Sunday Times

Joyride to Jupiter by Nuala O’ Connor New Island Press £9.99 pp180

Room Little Darker by June Caldwell New Island Press £9.99 pp220

If, as the writer Lorrie Moore claims, short stories are like love affairs while the novel is a marriage, then I’ll happily stay unattached. Being perfect for the phone readers and the pressed for time may explain the short story’s recent surge in popularity. However, as shown in two new collections, Joyride to Jupiter by Nuala O’Connor and Room Little Darker by June Caldwell, the short story also best reflects the intensity of contemporary life.

“With these moments of clarity we learn to value tiny things . . . that’s what I’m telling myself. We’re f*** all on the grand scale,” says the sadomasochistic slave narrator of Caldwell’s story Leitrim Flip. The characters in both collections share this ability to muse insightfully about the purpose of their own existence while simultaneously behaving in ways that contradict the insight. This calls to mind the title of Thomas Morris’ recent short-story collection We don’t know what we’re doing. As Caldwell’s slave continues: “I feel so mentally crazed so much of the time, I just want someone to take me in hand, to show me how to behave.”

O’Connor’s vivid characters are at least in the driving seat of life’s joyride, but seem far from in control. Those characters in Joyride to Jupiter who resist their own futility by using coping strategies such as repression, egotism and belligerence fare poorest. In the title story from the collection, the repercussions of elderly Mr. Halpin’s belief that he is “the worm” in his wife Teresa’s “dementia apple” costs him dearly, as does the blind egotism that leads Xavier in The Donor to decide on a whim to track down a young boy conceived through his sperm donation.

It is the characters that relinquish control in favour of acceptance who find momentary peace such as in O’Connor’s Girl Grief, in which a grandmother and her recently orphaned granddaughter surrender to the abyss of grief together. O’Connor’s language is clean and conscientious as well as poetic and lyrical, evident in the abstraction of Yellow. The collection exudes a quiet confidence and exercises the exemplary restraint of a seasoned writer who knows when to pull rather than push.

Caldwell’s high-octane Room Little Darker is the more freewheeling. From the outset her prose is a bombardment of sounds and images, like a boy racer’s car throbbing to its own dub-beat soundtrack. This is an unflinching collection which thuds with life and kicks with horror. It is miserably hilarious, taking in subjects as diverse as drug addiction, sadomasochism, homelessness, and even child robots designed for paedophiles in BoybotTM. Caldwell’s first collection is a mark maker, relentlessly demanding the reader to “take our modern horrors on the chin in the same way sewage is turned back into drinking water, axiomatically”.

Caldwell’s stories are underwritten by a deep assessment of the fallibility of the human condition. Upcycle is an affecting portrait of a family’s contradictory relationship to their abusive father’s dementia, and Cadaverus Moves is a loving warts-and-all depiction of a beloved brother’s death by cancer.

Both collections benefit by the other’s existence. O’Connor’s collection would be served by some of Caldwell’s fearlessness, and Caldwell by O’Connor’s informed subtlety of hand.

IRISH INDO REVIEWS *MISS EMILY*

The Irish Independent has reviewed Miss Emily - thanks to Des Traynor for the review. The piece is illustrated with a pic of Cynthia Nixon who is starring in an Emily biopic. This has nothing to do with my book or the film option taken on it. Review here.

MAYUMI AND THE SEA OF HAPPINESS - REVIEW

I came to the novel Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness via Twitter, which happens more and more these days. I commented on the lovely cover and an on-the-ball PR person offered me a copy to read. I get sent a lot of books, many of them not that interesting, but the premise for this one captivated me: 41 year old librarian has an illicit affair with a 17 year old boy on an island that is probably Martha's Vineyard.

Firstly, I used to work in a library and I adore them; secondly I'm always fascinated by forbidden love; thirdly my friend lives on the Vineyard, on and off, and I'm intrigued by the place. And fourthly, I love both Nabokov's Lolita and Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal, so I was interested to see how author Jennifer Tseng would handle the younger lover scenario in this, her début novel.

Well, Tseng does the cross-generational relationship absolutely beautifully. Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness is an accomplished novel of obsession, aloneness, fulfilment and loss; it is also about motherhood, friendship and generosity. And best of all, it is screamingly funny a lot of the time.

Tseng, who has published two award winning poetry collections and is a librarian on the Vineyard, was raised in California by a Chinese immigrant engineer father and a first generation German American microbiologist mother. Her second novel Woo will be based on her father's life. Her début clearly draws in part from her own life and Mayumi, though a literary creation, has all the contrariness of any flesh and blood, perimenopusal woman who is aching with loneliness.

Tseng has managed, like Nabokov, to make a sympathetic, hilarious narrator of Mayumi because her voice is at once self-deprecating, intelligent and contradictory. There is a gorgeous honesty to her and you can't help but love her and follow her into the inexplicable obsession with the unnamed young man. His beauty is what draws her to him initially, and the sex scenes are delicately done, but she soon has a kind of maternal interest in his well-being and is fascinated with every aspect of his - and his mother Violet's - life.

Mayumi is a woman 'distracted by ideas', as the young man points out. She is also slightly unhinged by lust. The balance for her is keeping the affair secret while staying sane living with a neglectful, gnome-carving husband and being the best mother to her daughter Maria. The mother-daughter relationship is delightful and utterly believable - their mutual love sings from the pages.

All of this is woven through with literary references galore - Melville, Shakespeare, Nabokov; as well as lush descriptions of the food the lovers share in their secret woodland cottage: orange infused chocolate, bundt cake, pork ramen (Mayumi is part Japanese). The life of the library and the island both loom large and add richness and depth to Mayumi's comings and goings. Water, sand, woods, snow, heat, cold - everything is sensually and wonderfully described.

If I have niggles they are few, this was a book I would sneak away to read more of - always an excellent sign. The book did feel overly long to me - I would have welcomed more scenes between the lovers and less ruminating from Mayumi. It's a small gripe - the novel is stunning and the dénouement perfect. If you like your narrators wordy, nerdy, funny and lovable, and your sex scenes uncompromising, this is the book for you. You can buy it here.