You must read this novel about the messiness of young men

Telegraph

13-04-2025

Fun and Games, the debut novel from John Patrick McHugh, charts a single summer on an island in Co Mayo, as lived by a 17-year-old called John. He's waiting for his final school results, and working shifts in the restaurant of the local hotel. The opening pages place us in the middle of a thrilling encounter between him and his older co-worker Amber – 'probably a mosher in school' – in the woods. His finger is deep inside her, which seems a good symbol for the exploration we're about to make of his fragile interior life. Welcome to the psyche of a teenage boy in all its humorous and hormonal glory.
Fun and Games follows McHugh's short-story collection, Pure Gold (2021), also set on an island on the Irish west coast. Though the literary form is longer, McHugh's lens is more focused: across John's long and usually overcast Irish summer, McHugh's motifs of power and sexuality acquire greater coherence and depth. Not that they feel coherent to John. Along with the business with Amber, he has to juggle the prospect of college in Galway, ambitions for glory on the local Gaelic football pitch, and the ghastly aftermath of an intimate photo his mother has accidentally leaked (earning John the nickname 'T-ts').
Although the action unfolds in Mayo, it's not the vast Atlantic seascapes that serve up the opera. Great moments of disclosure occur instead in the mundane contexts of adolescence, inching through the weekly shop in Sweeney's alongside his ostracised 'Mammy', or reaching for Amber's hand in the multiplex cinema in front of the latest Harry Potter film.
McHugh has said he set Fun and Games in 2009 because there was no major football tournament to bring John and his buddies out of their personal psychodramas and into communion with the wider world. Instead, they prefix their sentences with 'no malice', then launch into some cloaked attack on either each other or the girls nearby. It's like a zoological lens being trained onto the world of competitive boyhood jostling. But it does extend further, into the open antipathy one feels at the point you have outgrown your parents. Standing up to his father, who doesn't want his son to accept a lift from Amber, John feels no guilt. His parents' splintering marriage seems an embarrassing sexual failure when his own career is just beginning. The 'almighty' question, John concludes cynically, is this: 'What do you truly owe your parents. Money, okay. Fair: pukes of money.'
McHugh's linguistic rendering of John's interior world rings clear and true. Along with the masterfully choreographed football games and house-party scenes, I tore through these psychological pages under the spell of a writer at the top of his technical game. The emotional punches land with force, as well: John's tearful conversations in the car with his dad, or with his mates in the smoking area; his confused rejection of Amber in the woods.
Funny novels can often become frustrating when their humour inhibits the potential for poignancy. But Fun and Games avoids that trap, and catches its saddest moments by the throat. A scene where John's father delays entering his caravan, in order to wave off his estranged wife and son – 'shirt collar askew and flattened under the weight of his blazer, grimacing against the light' – was so tender and painfully rendered that I paused and briefly closed the book. McHugh's writing has the full range: it can be funny, and deeply sad, and at times horribly apt.
There should be a word, I think, for that summer between receiving your exam results and leaving for college or university. (A word such as 'Twixmas', but less awful.) So often, we use the phrase 'coming-of-age', though to a large extent that neglects the dizzy, grasping euphoria of that phase – so well conjured by McHugh – in which you're completely 'over' your environment and the people who raised you, yet you're nowhere near becoming an adult yourself. Fun and Games is all 'coming', but it doesn't fake the point of arrival. By the end of the summer, much of John's future remains unwritten; his football is booted high, and still up in the air.