Troubles and Calamities

I just finished reading Leslie Gray Streeter’s Family and Other Calamities, a very funny novel. The author is a Baltimore journalist whose work I follow on social media, and I pre-ordered the book. I like to pre-order books - I buy them and forget about them and then a month later, there’s a nice surprise in my Kindle queue. 

Right after I finished Family, I read Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, a novel set in Belfast in 1975. Kennedy herself describes it as a story of “star-crossed lovers” during the Troubles, and that’s as good a description as any other. Trespasses is astonishingly good; and even though I guessed exactly what was going to happen and exactly who would be revealed as responsible about halfway through, it was still page-turningly suspenseful until the end. 

When I started reading Trespasses, I knew right away that I’d have to read more of Louise Kennedy’s work, and then I found that she has only published one other book, The End of the World is a Cul de Sac. Louise Kennedy is almost exactly my age, and she spent most of her life working as a chef, with side forays into writing. It’s rare for someone to publish a first novel when they’re in their mid 50s, but Penelope Fitzgerald didn’t publish a book until she was 58, and she was absolutely brilliant. 

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Family and Other Calamities and Trespasses are two very different books, with a few things in common. Family is kind of a semi-serious comic novel, very funny, with underlying serious themes and a screwball comedy vibe. It’s a beach read with a brain. Trespasses is heavier - tragic and heartbreaking. But there’s a very strong connection between the two. Both novels feature women protagonists whose lives are completely altered by rash youthful decisions that open chasms between the before and the after. In Family, the protagonist runs away from her youthful mistake and only acknowledges many years later that running away might have been a mistake. But we know from the beginning that something happened in the past, and that we'll find out soon enough what it was. This is a comic novel, so the loose ends are tied up and the ending is happy and the people who deserve a comeuppance get it. Trespasses doesn’t really touch the chasm between youth and late middle age until the very end when we revisit Cushla, the young protagonist, who is now a middle-aged woman reckoning with the past, like the rest of 21st century Northern Ireland. And despite the tragedy, there’s also a happier-than-expected - or at least hopeful - ending. 

One more similarity - both of these authors have published two books, in two different genres. Kennedy’s earlier book is a volume of short stories, while Streeter’s is a memoir of the time following her husband’s untimely death, aptly titled Black Widow because she is a Black woman whose husband died. Both of these books are now in my Kindle queue. I will report back later.