If, post-Sally Rooney, it’s the job of the young female novelist to take the pulse of a generation, the diagnosis so far is worrying. In a burning world where job security and home ownership are a laughable dream, what’s left is a fixation on emotional life; the chase for romance, however fleeting. At its most basic, we’re left with a “does she get the guy?” narrative arc, without Rooney’s problematising acuity.
Newcomer Rachel Connolly strikes the by now familiar tone of confusion and melancholy, but with a piercing penetration and observational clarity. Belfast, if not a lazy city, is certainly a wary, “post-conflict” one. Erin, the narrator, considers what it means to hail from there: “It’s not like I can compare it with growing up anywhere else.” Her interlocutor is a lonely American academic with scarily perfect teeth whom she meets in a bar. Matt is a handy plot device in that Erin can use him to explain her own feelings about her birthplace during their awkward cultural interchanges. The Troubles is the great unspoken: “[People] don’t talk about it … they barely talk about anything else either.”
The novel opens with a discordant scene as Erin sets off for an early morning run, only to be confronted by a hostile woman walking her dog. A brittle standoff ensues, with a flurry of elliptical accusations. The woman turns out to be her mother. The Troubles have driven a wedge between the generations. Erin has returned to her home city having ditched her science course after the death of her best friend, Kate. She lives with Anne-Marie, somewhere between a friend and an employer, and mother of two noisy young boys. Erin’s ill-defined role in the home only adds to her unease. Matt calls her an au pair; she describes her job as “being around the house”.
Without Kate’s guiding hand, Erin drifts back into a tired relationship with a bad-news ex, Mikey, while also hooking up with American Matt (so designated to distinguish him from Mikey’s troubled brother Matt). It’s depressing for her to realise that, for all their cultural differences, American Matt and Mikey both spout porn cliches during sex: “Do you like that? Yes, you fucking like that.” Erin is a detached narrator, standing back from the action to judge others – scornfully noting, for example, the way English literature students at Queen’s go around holding a tattered book hoping you’ll ask what it is. In the quest to be individual, she observes, they end up “as such a clear type they’re conforming more than any of the rest of us”. Fitfully she applies the same level of analysis to herself. It suddenly strikes her, mortifyingly, that in their relationship both she and American Matt think they’re doing each other a favour.
Optimistic jacket copy describes the novel as “jarringly funny”, though it’s of the wry smile rather than belly laugh variety. Connolly describes hangovers and comedowns feelingly – Belfast is awash in coke and ket – and has an eye for the telling detail: every group of students has “at least one boy wearing a brown or mauve corduroy jacket or trousers. Sometimes both.” On Erin drifts, a lost soul, but as she ponders the cosmic mystery of Kate’s demise, there’s one place she can go to ask questions: the Catholic churches, where the statues and symbols, for all their shabby kitsch, wrest a kind of accommodation with the human condition. “Does she get the guy?” indeed, but this time with a profound extra dimension.
• Lazy City by Rachel Connolly is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
