Major Details

The Irish columnist Megan Nolan began writing fiction under the spell of Karl Ove Knausgaard. She read little else while starting her first novel, Acts of Desperation (2021). Nolan is hardly a newcomer to self-exposure: her columns and personal essays, animated by breezy, humane candor, tackle intimate subjects light and heavy—often sex, romance, and drinking (“all the things I love most,” as the Nolan-like narrator of Acts of Desperation remarks at one point). But she found in My Struggle, Knausgaard’s epic autobiographical novel, “much-needed permission” to prolong her inquiry into “emotional minutiae.” Her debut reads a little like an extended column: a one-sided account of an unbalanced relationship between the narrator and “the most beautiful man I had ever seen,” a volatile art critic named Ciaran, who is still in love and in contact with his ex-girlfriend.

Knausgaard may have also been a liberating influence on Nolan because he is not known, even among his fans, for the overwhelming splendor of his style: Fredric Jameson described his prose as “undistinguished,” Ben Lerner found it “sloppy,” James Wood noted its “flatness” and “prolixity,” Patricia Lockwood conceded that his sentences “are not always interesting.” Knausgaard himself has said that “there is a lot of bad writing” in the series, much of which he wrote quickly. He is an “extremely fast” reader, too—“good sentences have been wasted on me”—and is more interested in being immersed than impressed. “Admiration is of no use,” he once said in an interview, “and what I want instead is to disappear completely into the work, to lose my sense of the self.” This is how he “read as a kid, disappearing completely into other worlds.” Nolan—or the narrator of Acts of Desperation—identifies: “When I was small, before drinking and men and the rest, books were the thing that could absorb me entirely and let me forget myself.”

Acts of Desperation is mostly set between 2012 and 2014 in Dublin, where Nolan, like her narrator, spent her early twenties working temporary jobs and beginning to write after dropping out of university. The novel shares some of the appeal of her columns, including a zeal for intensive introspection and unembarrassed honesty. But it is also constrained by the resemblance. There is little formal experimentation with the narrator’s voice, which is more or less indistinguishable from the one Nolan deploys in magazines. (At one point in the book, she addresses “you, the enlightened readers.”) Not all the skills of an essayist, moreover, are transferable to fiction; analysis that might enrich a column often lands as unnecessary exposition in a novel. Acts of Desperation is studded with mundane aphorisms that feel gratuitous: “Couples will often disappear together for months in their beginning stages, which is not just about lust but also about building”; “Making a good meal at the end of a bad day can redeem the whole thing”; “It’s easy to disappear beneath the incessant cycle of chores necessary to keep a pleasant and clean home.”

The book toggles between the years of the unhappy relationship in Dublin and 2019 in Athens, to which Nolan had decamped from London for a few months (with Knausgaard in her suitcase) to eke out an arts bursary and write without distractions. The account, in other words, is written from a vantage that appears safely post-infatuation: “I was in love and so I was insane, and I can only feel glad I am at least no longer insane,” the narrator says. As in Nolan’s best columns, her way of frankly wrestling with the questions raised by the affair is engaging, but we are for the most part deprived of the drama of observing a character in the throes of experience.

Nolan’s new novel, Ordinary Human Failings, is an ambitious attempt to transcend the parameters of her debut—a departure from first-person narration, the recent past, “ordinary life” (or so it at first seems), and autobiography, although its characters share some of Nolan’s biographical coordinates. (Like Nolan, the novel’s central family, the Greens, has left the Irish town of Waterford for southeast London.) Its main action takes place in 1990 in London, interspersed with flashbacks to Ireland in the Seventies and Eighties, and concerns the fallout from a tragedy: a three-year-old girl named Mia Enright goes missing and is later found dead on a council estate. Another child—ten-year-old Lucy Green, who was last seen playing with her—is suspected of involvement. Whereas Acts of Desperation is about a single romantic relationship and is insular, almost solipsistic in form, Ordinary Human Failings is a far more social novel, with a fuller cast and multiple perspectives. It also takes an overt interest in “issues”: the psychology of violence, the classism of the tabloid press (and British society in general)—and, more broadly, the circumstances under which lives go awry, and the cascading, destructive effects of sequestering unbearable knowledge (an ordinary human failing if ever there was one).

While the missing child, Mia, is the daughter of a “popular young couple,” Lucy is “known universally as trouble,” the neglected offspring of a “rotten family” of “misanthropic Irish degenerates.” At least this is the portrait Tom Hargreaves, an eager young journalist at the Daily Herald, hopes to construct from the prejudiced impressions of the estate’s residents, many of whom mistrust and disdain the Greens: they live partly on welfare, keep to themselves (the Enrights, by contrast, are “a community staple”), and arrived from Ireland under mysterious circumstances, a “full family out of nowhere.” Lucy’s mother, Carmel, then still a teenager, had come to London seeking an abortion, a criminal offense in 1970s Ireland, but she had spent too long in denial, an attitude from which she has in a sense yet to recover.

Accompanied by her mother, Rose, Carmel ended up staying in London in her aunt’s unoccupied council flat. Mother and daughter were soon joined by Carmel’s taciturn father, John, and heavy-drinking older brother, Richie. None of them had much to keep them in Ireland: Carmel, whose boyfriend had abruptly left her, “couldn’t bear the shame of being in Waterford pregnant”; John is unable to work after an accident at a factory crushed his arm; Richie finds that the rudderless hedonism of his youth has soured into lonely alcoholism. But in England the Greens are isolated and mired in a sad stasis, each mourning the fateful mistakes and disappointments of their pasts. Carmel’s unwanted motherhood spoiled her ambitions—she had thought she was “destined for special things”—and she lives in a depressed daze, working night shifts at a convenience store, largely leaving Lucy in the care of Rose—until she dies of cancer two years before Mia goes missing.

We learn the Greens’ backstories mainly through the inconsistently plausible device Nolan uses to rotate between perspectives: while Lucy is under investigation, the Daily Herald puts her family up at a semi-defunct hotel near Mornington Crescent—ostensibly to keep them safe but in reality so that Tom, who hopes the scoop will endear him to his boss, can interview them, plying them with booze in order to spin a sensational story from their disclosures. (Nolan plucked this detail from Gordon Burn’s 1984 book about the murderer Peter Sutcliffe, whose family was apparently approached by tabloid journalists in similar fashion.) Despite Tom’s sordid mission, Nolan’s portrait of him—like virtually every portrait in the novel—is calculated to elicit sympathy. He is painfully ambitious and has his own anxieties about his social background: his parents are described as “standard lower-middle-class aspirational Tories,” and he is adaptable (he can round himself up and down, in class terms) but also uncomfortable, afraid of exposure. In one early scene he looks in the mirror of an elevator and thinks, “I’m the loneliest man in the world!” Yet Tom fades from view as the Greens’ extended reminiscences in the hotel frustrate his project and as the novel itself strays from its crime thriller beginnings.

Notwithstanding the book’s ambitious scale and the gravity of its themes, Nolan’s major preoccupation remains “emotional minutiae.” Ordinary Human Failings opens with a gambit to absorb the reader in Carmel’s inner life: “The night the child went missing, Carmel sat a few miles away in the window of a cafe.” She “ignored the gentle rattle of plates and hiss of chips which went on behind her, hearing nothing.” She is “raking through lost evenings and moments…thinking about sex.” Wrapped in memories of Lucy’s father, her old boyfriend back in Ireland, Carmel is in her own world. Or is she? If she is “ignoring” the din around her, is she “hearing nothing” or rather precisely trying to shut out what she can hear? The sentence seems unable to decide, though it’s a distinction Nolan acknowledges a few pages later, when a neighbor recalls seeing Carmel sitting on her balcony as the infant Lucy screamed inside: “You couldn’t even say she was ignoring it. She didn’t seem to hear.” She had named her nights with Lucy’s father

after things they had consumed together, and which she could then recall the taste of in his mouth.

Particular drinks (White Russian Night), plain meals he had cooked with sweet incompetence (Spaghetti Bolognese Night), takeaway pizza with a faint cardboard flavour (Gino’s Night).

Are these memories as emotionally minute as they seem? Carmel is not so much immersed in her memories as husbanding them, less thinking about sex than thinking about thinking about sex. She alludes to intimate sensation but doesn’t precisely evoke it: “his sweat smelled that way it did in her mind, so green and pleasant.”

Just as it’s unclear how lost in thought Carmel really is, we may not be certain how absorbed we are—unsure of what we are immersed in, since characters’ memories are less summoned than alluded to in a kind of shorthand, tagged with identifying details. Nolan’s first novel is full of such details, seductive but a touch superficial, as though rummaged from nostalgia’s cupboard. The narrator writes of huddling with her housemate “on our awful bony couch,” drinking “strong tea with the teabags left in,” smoking rollies and eating cheaply—“we cracked an egg into more or less everything.” The familiarity of this sketch is part of its charm but also its dissatisfaction: the bony couch and rolled cigarettes are near-clichés of cash-strapped youth that provide quick-hit recognition. At one point in Acts of Desperation, the narrator explains that she has two modes of drunkenness, one solitary and steady, the other social and raucous, “characterized by exuberant good spirits and a communal edge of mania.” Though styled as a personal revelation, this more or less describes the effect of alcohol on everyone. In columns, universal truth accessed through autobiographical disclosure may be desirable, but here it seems almost like a category error.

There is something appealingly compassionate and nonjudgmental about Nolan’s persona as a columnist, but her sympathetic attitude to her characters in the novels can at times feel too much like an agenda. It’s as though defanging the tabloid’s lurid tale of evil about the Greens entailed telling an equally lurid parable of ordinary inadequacy and misfortune, a simplistic story of complexity. (As Carmel sums it up to Tom, making the novel’s title sound inescapably cheesy, “We’re just an ordinary family, with ordinary unhappiness like yours.”) It can sometimes feel as if characters are filled out only to the extent that they showcase the “issues” the book is exploring, or so that their flaws can be comprehended, as though the point of storytelling were fundamentally explanatory, even exculpatory. Lucy’s primary school teacher, for example, a peripheral character whom Tom interviews early on, reveals that she failed to report having seen Lucy bashing her head against a sink after hurting another child. In just three pages, we learn—the teacher herself makes the connection—that the reason she didn’t inform anyone was because, as a teenager, she once saw her disabled sister sobbing in her room, evidently “suffering in the recesses of a privacy so total that it was almost evil. She had never fully lost this terror of the private suffering of other people, nor the shame of wanting not to see it.”

Exploring the psychological history of marginal characters is an impressive aim, but its execution feels schematic and cursory. Characterization in the novel sometimes has this hasty feel: tacked on, tokenistic, a hack to make the character more complex (as when, for example, we’re told of Tom’s history of fraught homoerotic attachments). Perhaps this is a consequence of the novel spreading itself too thin: Ordinary Human Failings is barely more than two hundred pages, shorter than Acts of Desperation despite covering so much more ground.

Whereas Nolan applies herself to unfolding the psychology of her characters with almost unwieldy vigor, she devotes far less energy to rendering the texture of their reality. At one point, Rose discovers a letter “folded up into a wedge to steady a wobbly kitchen chair.” This sort of detail is amazingly scarce in the novel. Little effort is made to evoke place or era, and what there is can feel half-hearted and generic, such as this description of the façade of the hotel: it had “a grand old bright red” door, with “a pretty hand-painted sign to its right” that “said Hotel Gargano in intricate lettering beside a picture of green grapes.”

It’s telling, in this respect, that the most vivid passages in both of Nolan’s fairly boozy novels concern getting drunk. Consider, for example, the account of the bender that leads to Richie getting sacked from his job, the beginning of his downward spiral. Whereas sensation is lingered on—“He drank again, draining the second cup, feeling it burn into his chest cavity and the bubble of levity and pleasure travel further into his brain”—the world is a blur: a friend “stood up and put on a record, something loud and indecipherable and modern-sounding, exciting.” At a squint you could argue that “something loud and indecipherable and modern-sounding” is not a historical cop-out but an accurately impressionistic description of how unfamiliar music can sound to us at a party, and even that it’s a skillful evasion of one of the pitfalls of historical fiction, in which period details can feel distractingly pointed. (“He stood up and put on a record by an interesting new band called Joy Division.”) But the paucity of precise, convincing world-building in the rest of the novel argues against such a generous reading.

Paradoxically, Nolan’s preoccupation with emotional minutiae at times muddies her portrayal of her characters’ inner lives. When we meet Tom, for example, he is “feeling more relaxed than he had all day” at the prospect of the scoop. In the very next sentence, he is on edge: “He bristled in the excitable anxiety” on the estate. A couple of pages on, escorting his sniffling date—from whom he got wind of the case—upstairs to her apartment, we are told that “he would so love to go home, he would love to be anywhere.” The inconsistency—the implausibly rapid changes of heart—betrays a set of priorities: an interest in interior states over rigorously representing a coherent world, intensity over detail, immersion over precision. (Nolan seemed to acknowledge these tendencies in her article for the Guardian about Knausgaard: “All my life, events have seemed flexible and unknowable, whereas feelings seemed to me real; they had the dramatic and concrete force that events lacked.”) It’s as though each sentence—each unit of description—were emotionally myopic, not fully accountable to its predecessor, and as though feelings were free-floating, untethered from the characters who experience them.

If Nolan can seem in excessive control of her message, she at times appears in less than complete command of her sentences. Many feel improvable. In Acts of Desperation the prose sometimes lapses into a form of overstatement that can be entertaining in personal journalism but jars here, as when the narrator describes a woman’s “whimsical charm” as “eye-wateringly acute.” (The word “insane” is sometimes used as an amplifier.) The sentences in Ordinary Human Failings are too often marred by clumsy syntax and wastefully approximate locutions. (Carmel “loved the feeling of doing something on her own, and doing it in a routine.”) Sensitive perceptions are sometimes poorly expressed: when John discovers that Carmel is pregnant, for example, “it seemed to Carmel that he was enjoying it almost, the way the anger was directional and, it could not be denied, to do with a serious matter.” Sometimes the prose has an almost bureaucratic prolixity, as when Carmel, wanting to ask Lucy about what happened with Mia, realizes that “she did not have an intuitive sense of what level of cognition Lucy was operating under when it came to such matters.”

Do these ordinary human failings matter? Must good novels be made of perfect sentences? By contrasting aesthetic admiration (“of no use”) with absorption, Knausgaard appeared to be suggesting that conspicuously immaculate sentences can disturb the reverie of the reader, who, instead of being submerged in the book’s world, is dazzled by its glittering surface. But ungainly sentences produce their own glare. The stylistic infelicities in Ordinary Human Failings may be subtle but they accumulate. I often found myself reading in a state of unwelcome tension, braced for imperfection. Far from forgetting myself as I read, I was constantly reminded of myself, in an unflattering light: irritably vigilant, in frowning pursuit of the next blemish. (I became the literary equivalent of what is known in filmmaking as the “continuity supervisor.”)

It’s not just that semantic slips can lead to more substantive confusions that draw you out of the character’s mind—as when we’re unsure of how absorbed Carmel is in her memories or how Tom feels about his scoop. The major problem with even minor imperfections is that they dent our faith in the artist’s control and in the internal perfection of their artwork. They deprive us of the “absolute knowledge” that everything in the work matters, as the philosopher Stanley Cavell once put it, recalling his elation after seeing Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night.

Nolan began her career writing essays for live performance, and one senses that just as Knausgaard would prefer to be immersed rather than impressed, she values vitality over meticulousness. But rawness is not the only route to producing art that feels alive—nor even a particularly reliable one. George Saunders, evangelist for intensive revision, once wrote that “with enough attention,” a sentence can “be not only from you, but you…a thing in the world.” Arranged with enough care, language can become not merely a way of referring to reality but an aspect of it, both the windowpane and part of the view. Fine writing, this would suggest, can overcome the tension between delighting in the surface of a text and wishing to be swallowed by it.

Eventually, Lucy is released without being charged. As Nolan hastily explains:

It seemed likely it was Lucy who in the end killed Mia. It was no longer clear whether the killing was accidental or otherwise, and the corroboration of so many other children that a dangerous game was involved changed the texture of the incident. It was diffused now with enough doubt and disparate blame to mean something other than it had seemed at first.

The Greens return to Waterford to recover from the ordeal. It’s a sad but quietly hopeful ending: Lucy starts seeing a therapist, and Carmel begins to repair—or really, to commence—her relationship with her daughter. On the penultimate page of the novel, Carmel is reminiscing again, this time about her childhood: “the feeling of biting down into a butter and sugar sandwich at the beach and not knowing immediately if the crunch was sand or grains of sweetness.” It’s a lovely image, a frustratingly rare evocation of sensuous texture, but it was wasted on me. I couldn’t help feeling that minuteness itself—now a literally granular attention—was being fetishized, offered up as a disappointing substitute, another shorthand, as though “minutiae” alone were enough to convince me it was all real. By then I didn’t particularly believe it was Carmel’s memory. Maybe it’s Nolan’s; it felt like it could be anyone’s.