My Coney Island Baby by Billy O’Callaghan
Jonathan Cape, £14.99
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.
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