The coming-of-age novel tends to follow a formula: the title of Girl in the Making, Anna Fitzgerald’s debut, acknowledges as much. The cover shows a red bicycle that is slightly rusted. I know before opening the book that we will meet our girl in early childhood, and discover the events and experiences that shape her understanding of the world.
Jean is three when she introduces herself in the unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness telling of a child still coming to grips with language. It’s reminiscent of, though less daring than, the opening pages of Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and it puts us right there, hiding with her in the garden. Why we are hiding we do not know, just that we are “in the golden honeypot” waiting for Pooh Bear because “the lion is coming”. This sense of threat does not abate. A page later, Jean is four and has been left at home by her mother (“When she goes out I am afraid, very afraid”). We do not know the nature of the danger, but we know that “HE” is a part of it. “HE” and “HIM” are used throughout to refer to Jean’s father, Edmund – in this 1960s/70s middle-class Dublin household he is God, and not the benevolent sort.
My grandfather, who had six children, once said that in small families there is nowhere to hide. This novel of a large family is all about what is hidden and what is exposed, both from others and from ourselves. It comes with praise from Anne Enright, who explored that psychology to devastating effect in The Gathering. There is trauma here, too, but captured with a lightness of touch that renders it all the more affecting. In the case of one sexual experience, we receive only the briefest of explanations: “I had just momentarily, terrifyingly, found myself in another place, as someone else’s passenger.”
The trauma is described by Jean as the “black demon bird” from which she must try to hide and also protect her siblings. The reduced surveillance of children in big families, as well as their additional care responsibilities, are beautifully conveyed. Jean is a sort of proto-mother to her younger siblings and the burden of defending them is often heavy, but sibling love is also a solace. In Jean’s relationship with her younger brother, baby John F Kennedy, we witness the tender acts of care that can be a salvation (“I set him on my bed as though he were a baby and I lay beside him, smoothing his sweaty hair off his forehead”). There is much that is moving in Fitzgerald’s portrayal of Jean’s mother, too, whose attempt to embody the perfect housewife in the face of great betrayal pushes her to the brink.
The challenge in writing a coming-of-age novel is not to give your heroine a wisdom or a linguistic sophistication beyond her years, and in this Fitzgerald largely succeeds, with Jean’s voice shifting and developing with almost every chapter; each is numbered with her age. It is in Jean’s late adolescence that we see glimpses of the adult writer she will perhaps one day become. (Of an encounter with a man, she recalls: “He tossed my coat into a corner, and I watched its flight as though in slow motion. It caught the edge of the sideboard and slid on to the floor, and I got the distinct impression I was still in it.”) Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the chauvinism of the era and the struggle for female independence is reminiscent of the work of Tessa Hadley and Elena Ferrante.
I felt desperate for quiet, birdlike Jean to find her external voice, and when she does it does not disappoint. It is angry, wry, at times merciless, and I wish there was more of it, but only because I like her so much. This is a character that truly lives. When she has to leave the family home, her independence comes at a price: in the adult world, too, are predatory men. Jean must hide yet again, but soon she will have enough of hiding, and the reader will want to cheer.
• Girl in the Making by Anna Fitzgerald is published by Sandycove (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
