Book review: My Coney Island Baby by Billy O’Callaghan

Review by Nick Major

Michael and Caitlin are two middle-aged lovers who book themselves

into a cheap hotel room on Coney Island. They are both married, but

they have managed to keep their relationship secret for the past 25

years. All seems well. Then Michael tells Caitlin about his wife’s

cancer diagnosis. “His flesh has the bruised shade and texture of

putty, and hangs from his strongest features, thickening his nose

and lending a maudlin heft to his cheeks. His mouth seems to be

receding too, sinking finally from the strain of holding back years’

worth of the things that so badly need saying.”

My Coney Island Baby is about how what we know about people changes

how we see them, and how the world seems to work against love.

O’Callaghan’s prose is intensely romantic – sometimes verging on

schmaltz – but perfect for this kind of novel. He is a writer who

has an unyielding faith in the strength and vitality of language to

convey the emotions and the physical world. In this sense, he is

old-fashioned, straight out of the much-neglected D.H. Lawrence

school of writing.

He has won plaudits for his short story collection, The Things We

Lose, The Things We Leave Behind. His scenes here contain the

microscopic detail of the best short stories. There are long

sections describing lovers’ bodies and the decayed backdrop of the

once lively and carnivalesque Coney Island. In midwinter, there are

few people around – only hotel clerks and windswept lovers it seems

– and the wooden strand is dilapidated, including the pier, where

“decades have layered the timber with a rind of mucus, the ghoulish

algae-tinge of ocean and ocean breath.”

The novel is structured around the lovers’ day-long tryst, but we

are continuously borne back into the past. We hear about Michael’s

childhood in rural Ireland and how he left poverty to make a new

life for himself in New York, his marriage to a woman called

Barbara, and the death of his baby son. Caitlin has similarly come

from poverty and is abandoned by her drunk father-figure, who goes

out one day for a cigarette and never comes back. In the early years

of her marriage, she is part-way to becoming a writer. She has

success publishing stories in magazines. Then, strangely, she puts down her pen for good.>

Although the novel’s form is commonplace now, what is rarer is that

Michael and Caitlin meet at a time “when neither one had been out

hunting a fix.” In other novels of this ilk, lovers always seem to

be running from failed relationships. Once Michael and Caitlin

hook-up in a bar, however, it is as if “love had, for the first

time, revealed its shades of intent.” What also sets O’Callaghan

apart is his narrator’s voice. Although we are given the usual

insights into characters’ thoughts, his narrator is unusually

forthright and even essayistic.

This can go two ways. It can strike the wrong tone, such as in this

example, which could have been lifted from a quack psychiatry

textbook. “Between most people, a kind of fear exists. Love lies in

getting past that fear to the open space beyond. Once that happens,

failure is no longer important. But no one gets there easily.”

At other times, it is refreshing and insightful. After describing

the lovers looking out to the watery horizon, the narrator tells us

the ocean “has an aspect of space, in that a vast acreage of what

lies beneath is mere theory. There because it must be there, as God

is, for believers…and six feet under, down where the day’s light can

no longer penetrate and where even the strongest winds fail to

reach, lies a whole other existence, running to a perfectly ordered

cycle of feeding, multiplying and dying.”

O’Callaghan is here talking about the possibility that other ways of

living exist. It is an idea Michael and Caitlin must hold on to if

they are to keep their relationship alive. At the end, the plot

hinges on this heart-breaking dilemma. O’Callaghan might be a

flowery romantic, but he is also a writer who knows how to control

his characters, his narrative, and – mostly - his voice. That’s what

counts, and it’s what makes My Coney Island Baby such a good novel.