Eimear McBride's new novel returns to familiar characters, with a cinematic twist

Boston Globe

2 days ago

'The City' is technically set in December 1996, but its narrative yo-yos between that present day and events during the prior 16 months. Eily and Stephen now live together, in a flat that is 'palatial' when compared to his former cramped bedsit. She is continuing university, while he has directed an autobiographical film, which he was scripting in 'Lesser Bohemians,' and returned to the stage. Their relationship is still funded primarily by the yearning, almost covetous capital of sex, which McBride writes as well as anyone: 'What I'm after is just all of you. Touch the arc of your eyebrow. Down to your cheek. On and then in between your lips. To lick a tip before the kiss. And you, on repetition, caving to it.' And their actions continue to create impediments to their contentment. Eily is keeping secrets, namely that she has been writing about her life, a text that sounds rather like 'The Lesser Bohemians.'
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McBride is keeping secrets too, having her protagonists spend most of the novel deliberately talking around some event that has wreaked havoc on their relationship, a manufactured mystery whose obfuscation grows a bit tedious. The most avowed source of disruption for the couple is Grace, Stephen's estranged daughter who has reentered his life. Her extended visit to London raises logistical and psychological barriers for everyone, and forces them to face in person the reality that she is just two years younger than Eily, leading to some enthralling scenes between the two teenagers.
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The quicksilver slickness that characterizes McBride's best prose is disrupted by the novel's continuous time jumps, but 'The City' still conclusively demonstrates why she is one of the most thrilling contemporary English-language writers, with her ingenious grammatical compromises, as with 'So I sighed, smiled, sofa sat. Made sure my knees were tug-covered by nightshirt,' and subtle poetics, such as 'So, though drink made thought thick, it was a long, brittle unpick of my freezing wet clothes.' By the stratospheric standards of her prior novels, however, 'The City' does stumble in a few ways that feel entangled with the author's recent foray into film.
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In 2023, McBride wrote and directed 'A Very Short Film About Longing,' in which a teacher, played by Joe Alwyn, clumsily negotiates the end of an adulterous affair while being stalked by a teenaged student. The creative interests that birthed that 15-minute short are visible throughout 'The City,' in its overly episodic structure, the abundance of chatty dialogue indented like a script, and especially the screening of Stephen's movie. The latter event serves as a vehicle for Grace to confront her father's disturbing past, similar to the way that the 'long night' ushering in Stephen's 39th birthday in 'The Lesser Bohemians' imparted this same information to Eily. Despite the unremitting bleakness of these memories, McBride's approach in the earlier novel succeeds (brilliantly) because of the verve with which it is written. In 'The City,' these recollections, largely a parade of rapid-fire scenes of sex, domestic violence, drug abuse, and incest, are presented as a screenplay, complete with stage directions, such as 'INTERIOR. TOILETS. EVENING. BLACK. Bleep. Bleep. Medical sounding. Tinny and rhythmic,' a stultifying stylistic choice that grinds the narrative to a halt. The ultimate purpose of this section is also slightly unclear since Grace drops out of the story after the screening without any discussion of what she saw and the narrative returns to plot points that have lain dormant for 90 pages.
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Given the financial realities of publishing, I understand there might be practical motivations for novelists to branch out, and there are surely creative reasons as well. I recall a memorable passage in McBride's third novel, 'Strange Hotel,' where the narrator, candidly musing on her faith in language, confesses that 'It's harder to let the words into her body now or, maybe, out,' which makes her occasionally 'wistful for the savagery of before when, beholden to no one, the words did whatever they pleased.' It can't be easy to write with McBride's virtuosity, so while I will welcome the continued evolution of her fiction in whatever forms it takes, I hope that she finds an outlet to explore her cinematic interests without having to smuggle them into another novel.
THE CITY CHANGES ITS FACE
By Eimear McBride
Faber & Faber, 336 pages, $29
Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer and critic.