FICTION: Set in the early 2000s, Caroline O'Donoghue's novel is twisty and compulsive.
"The Rachel Incident" by Caroline O'Donoghue; Knopf (304 pages, $28)
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I didn't just read Caroline O'Donoghue's latest novel, "The Rachel Incident." I pigged out on it.
I half-expected to see words smeared on my face or crumbled down my shirt and all over my lap when I looked up from the last page, to be followed by the welling shame of having gorged on nothing but empty calories. But who could doubt the nutrient value of such tasty sentences as "I felt like a child whose imaginary friend was starting to bite people" or "He looked stunned, like someone who had made a monkey's paw wish that had come true, but in all the wrong ways"? Certainly not me.
I should have lingered — but who am I kidding? There was no slowing down as I feasted on the tale of Irish college student Rachel Murray, who meets English transplant James Devlin at a Cork bookstore where both work. She's instantly smitten but in a friends-only way because he's gay, even if he isn't admitting it ("he was closeted, and he thought that his closet was a good one"). They become fast friends, roommates and eventual conspirators in a plan to get Rachel within seduction range of her professor, Fred Byrne, even though he has a wife.
The plot might sound trite, even a tad icky, but all is not what it seems. Twists await. Some of them rely maybe too heavily on coincidence but they still manage to surprise. And what could have been lightweight is enriched by placing events against a backdrop of the recession of the early 2000s, when the book is largely set, as well as the fight for abortion rights in Ireland and changing views on homosexuality.
I suppose a comparison could be made between O'Donoghue, who has written two other novels and is in the midst of a young adult series, and Sally Rooney, also Irish and the author of "Normal People," which became a Hulu series. College students and their entanglements interest both writers, but they part ways over tone. Rooney is darker; O'Donoghue is, well, funnier, as the aforementioned sentences attest. (For a further taste of her humor, check out "Sentimental Garbage," her podcast about "the culture we love that society can sometimes make us feel ashamed of.")
The framing device is sometimes clunky; a mature Rachel relates events from 10 or so years down the road, butting into the narrative when least expected or needed, apparently for the purpose of foreshadowing. But none of this stopped me from simply wanting to know what was going to happen and enjoying the heck out of this novel. I gobbled it down.
Good thing "The Rachel Incident" ends or I'd still be sitting on the couch covered in word crumbs.
