A moving examination of love
Irish author’s coming-of-age tale surprises readers at every turn
Set against the backdrop of Ireland in the late 1990s, “Tender,” the stunning new novel from Irish writer Belinda McKeon, follows Catherine, who grew up in a small town and has moved to Dublin to go to school.
The sheltered Catherine meets budding artist James when he returns to Dublin from a year in Germany, where he has been working for a noted photographer. Catherine has been subletting his room, living with his two (female) friends, hearing stories about the legendary former tenant.
James and Catherine fall into an easy friendship, one which grows via close contact and unguarded confidences.
In a time of flux and change in the outer world, James reveals that he is gay, not exactly an easy confidence — a secret that changes the nature of their friendship.
But Catherine has a secret of her own, an attraction to James that continues to build, in intensity and desperation.
While this might make “Tender” sound sensationalistic, it is nothing of the sort. Instead, the novel is a profoundly moving, deeply disturbing examination of the nature of love and relationships, of friendship and loss, obsession and the psychic violence of love — a book that surprises readers at every turn.
McKeon, whose first novel, “Solace,” won the 2012 Faber Prize and was named Irish Book of the Year, is a masterful stylist. As the novel develops, the emotional changes are reflected, seemingly effortlessly, through changes in the novel’s stylistic approach.
Beginning with the realistic stages of the early relationship, continuing through the deliberate overwroughtness of attraction (with an almost purple prose), through the fractured, almost manic passages that viscerally capture the nature of obsession and, finally, the novel closes with the crystalline, haunting beauty of the coda, set in New York City almost two decades after the main events.
It’s a bravura performance, but one which is firmly rooted in the characters and their emotional development; the stylistic shifts serve as another means for revealing deeper truths, for shining light into shadowed corners rarely seen.
With this careful attention to craft, and her subtle interweaving of the larger world into the almost claustrophobic intimacy of the central relationship, McKeon has created a powerful coming-of-age story, wrapped within a surprising story of love — one which rings painfully true.