She doesn’t write novels that hold your hand
“All three of the Drumm brothers were at the funeral, although one of us was in a coffin.”
It is a tasty amuse-bouche as far as first lines go. And one that sets the banquet for “Little Cruelties.” The latest by Ireland’s Liz Nugent — an author who has been appointment-reading for me ever since discovering her novels two years ago — she is, to me, one of the greatest things to come out of her country since leprechauns, Shepherd’s pie and Dolores O’Riordan from the Cranberries wailing “in your head” in the song “Zombie.”
Skeletons and skulduggery. That is the deal, re: her newest — a vast, prismatic story about three brothers.
Nugent does not write novels that hold your hand, whisper sweet caresses in your ear or even lead you through fields of redemption. Fair warning: If you are wedded to “likeable” characters, mosey along. There is a reason that one of the blurbs for her new one likens it to the blowhards and knaves of TV’s “Succession.” Her books are mean, mean, mean. (Though there is complexity and shading, even when waxing about the darker side of the human condition.)
Appearing via Zoom from her home on the Emerald Isle the other day, a part of me was unsurprised to see that on my computer screen she looked as innocuous as the nice lady you might see walking her dog in your neighbourhood. Your local obliging pharmacist, say. The politesse of an aging au pair.
“I wrote that line down and then the prologue,” Nugent started to tell me about that opener of her book, deciding then that she would proceed non-linearly. Back and forth. Earlier, later, much later, earlier still, woven from shifting POVs. “I did not write it chronologically and crush it up … I was picking random years. The span of their lives (fluttering from the 1960s to this decade) is roughly the span of my life.”
And, true enough, she was not certain how it would unfold until it did: “I did not know who was in the coffin until I got there.” The method to her madness, the modus operandi with all of her novels? “I figure if I surprise myself I will surprise the reader.”
The basic thread in the spool of “Little Cruelties,” then: sifting through the decades, the voices of the brothers overlap, in some instances building on events we’ve read about before, but with different context, to help “build up the enmity between them … those tiny little betrayals, and then deeper betrayals … the way the brothers betrayed each other, and the way their mother betrayed, well, at least two of them.”
There is Will: film producer, man-whore, narcissist sine qua non and sometime family man. There is Luke: a beautiful artistic Peter Pan who’s too vulnerable for his own good and self-destructive to boot. There is Brian: the floater of the bunch who is ruthless in his own way, seemingly the most normal of the three, until you realize “normal” is subjective at best.
Envy, spite, Catholicism, mental illness, the Cannes Film Festival and Sept. 11. All factor into their interlocking tales.
Does she find it easier to write from the male point of view? Nugent says she does.
Men, she expounds, are generally more “straightforward” and “say what they mean,” while “women dance around the subject.” A story she tells is from when she started dating her husband, Richard, a sound engineer (they met when she was a production manager on the touring production of “Riverdance”): “I’d be in a huff about something and I’d be like I’m fine, and I would expect him to ask me more questions … but he thought I was fine because I said I was fine.”
And while sisters, as a subject, have been much pored over in both literature and screen over time — everything from Jane Austen novels to the Marcia Marcia Marcia- ness of “The Brady Bunch” — the brotherly motif still leads, primarily, to Cain and Abel. “Sisters are much more likely to keep their hurt under wraps,” Nugent muses. “Nurse their grudges. They might not be as confrontational. Boys (are) more likely to be confrontational.”
One of nine (!) children, the author also says she knows a little something about sibling dynamics — though she is quick to caveat, “My family is not like the boys in the book! To be clear.”
Of the many ways she was made into the unrelenting observer that she is — evident, too, from her previous novels like the eerily fantastic “Lying in Wait” — is that Nugent grew up with a neurological disorder called dystonia (“you will find many writers were sick kids”). What makes her unsparing, specifically, when it comes to parent/child bonds is that she doesn’t have kids. (She and her husband both decided they didn’t want any and, she says, it’s due to her outside status that she finds mothers often confiding in her: “I know women who do not love their children. It is such a taboo subject.”)
Music is something that inspires when hatching her books, she continued. Both consciously and not. In “Little Cruelties,” a turning point is one set around a big Bob Dylan concert held on the grounds of Ireland’s Slane Castle in the 1980s — something directly borrowed from a concert she actually attended with pals (she was a bit young to be going to a Dylan concert, but “we were trying to be cool. And deep”).
Another inspiration, albeit in ways more cursory? A YouTube clip she stumbled upon of Nina Simone singing “Stars” at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Fest.
“She is sort of at the end of her career, under the influence of drugs or drink,” Nugent describes it now. “She shouts at the audience. She forgets the lyrics. The lyrics she is singing, they are so poignant to the point she is in her life. It fit (with my book) because so much is about celebrity … how it can change you, damage you. Let you get away with bad behaviour.”
Coming from a country that has long punched above its weight, fiction-wise — Ireland has produced four Nobel laureates in literature, and has an equally impressive modern haul in writers including Roddy Doyle and Sally Rooney — Nugent tells me that her books, outside of her own land, actually do the best in Canada. And the admiration? Mutual. “Rohinton Mistry and his novel ‘A Fine Balance’ is one of my top three novels ever.”
Turning to the way her books have been classified — “I have been called domestic noir, psychological suspense, thriller, general fiction … crime. They move around a lot.” — I mention that this latest is the least thriller-y of her thrillers, in that the whodunnit is way less important than the whydunnit. She does not quarrel the point.
“I don’t think I am capable of writing a book without someone killing someone,” she scoffs. “In my real life, I am good-humoured … I do not suffer from depression or mental health issues, thank God.”
She adds: “When crime writers get together, we actually have the best fun. We are much more likely to support each other’s books. At romantic novelist conventions … they are more likely to get snippy with each other.”
In other words: The bloodshed is kept for the page.