San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Troubles she’s seen: ‘Milkman'
“Milkman,” Northern Irish author Anna Burns’ third novel and surprise winner of 2018’s Man Booker Prize, was chosen unanimously for that honor over works by heavy-hitter shortlist competitors Rachel Kushner, Esi Edugyan, Robin Robertson, Daisy Johnson and Richard Powers. Most book critics have now weighed in: They’re impressed. Only one American critic, Dwight Garner of the New York Times, objects: “I found ‘Milkman’ to be interminable, and would not recommend it to anyone I liked.”
I’m bound, in principle, to agree. With utmost respect for Burns’ achievement (and real delight for dark horse winners), “Milkman” is a difficult read. Fresh, important, brave, fierce — even funny, yes. But I found myself jumping up every 10 minutes to go do anything else.
Voice, without question, is the novel’s triumph. Its owner, an 18-year-old known only as “middle sister,” is a whip-smart, wary, feisty young woman whose sharp, nervous, witty narrative beguiles at once. She lives with her large but hobbled-by-untimely-death family (like nearly every other family there) in a Belfast-like city (Burns grew up in Belfast) during the 1970s, when political and religious wars were at full throttle.
Middle sister walks everywhere, and likes to read while she walks. Everyone — including the genial fellow she sometimes sees, called “maybe-boyfriend” — finds this habit horrific, a willful walling-out. “[I]t became ... further proof against me. ‘Reading-whilewalking’ was definitely on the list.” One day as she’s “walking along reading Ivanhoe,” a white van drives up and a man leans out, “smiling, friendly and obliging,” offering her a lift. The married, 41-year-old, paramilitary leader known as Milkman has begun to stalk her.
“He knew my work — where it was, what I did there, the hours, the days and the twenty-past-eight bus I caught every morning when it wasn’t being hijacked to get me into town to it.” Also that “[e]very weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentiethcentury books because I did not like the twentieth century.”
Family and community instantly turn against middle sister, assuming she is having an affair with Milkman — scandalous enough — also thereby cheating on maybe-boyfriend, putting maybe-boyfriend at risk of immediate assassination.
As she tries to outrun or elude Milkman, to appease accusing family or crazy acquaintances (one, called “tablets girl,” goes around poisoning people’s drinks), middle sister pulls us deep into the paradoxical vortex
of this ruined, chaotic world, “our intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossipy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district,” finger-puzzle tight and increasingly airless.
“[H]aving awareness ... both of rumour and of actuality — didn’t prevent things from happening or allow for intervention ... or reversal of things that had already happened. Knowledge didn’t guarantee power, safety or relief and often for some it meant the opposite of power, safety and relief.” “Milkman” doubles as history-at-a-slant, a gut-level, You Are There testimony — ambiance spelled out in casually graphic terms on every page: murders, torture, intramural spying, poisonings, disappearances, weapons stockpiling, kangaroo courts, beatings, surveillance cameras, bugged phones. At one point, all the dogs of a neighborhood are executed. People cross a street or start a car — boom. Sometimes a victim’s head, once blown off, can never be found. (In an odd symmetry with the novel’s non-naming of people, factions, or locales, most of its violence occurs off-camera.)
Naturally, women of that place and time have it bogglingly rough — the novel’s being hailed for #MeToo echoes — as girlfriends, grandmas or exhausted wives, birthing up to a dozen kids (many of whom get killed); holding together ragged households after their men die of illness, depression or vendetta. If a young woman’s not married and under way with all the above by, say, age 16, their mothers panic (“for them this was no cliché, no comedy”) and eyebrows waggle.
It’s this crushing, saturating paranoia that “Milkman” conveys — inside the culture, among the sexes, compounded and enforced by want and terror in the endless, internecine wars of the Troubles. “[M]ost people here ... learn to present their topmost mental level to those who were reading it whilst in the undergrowth of their consciousness, inform themselves privately of what their true thinking was about.”
What makes the reading sloggy is its airlessness — a perhaps too-successful effect of middle sister’s voice. Certainly (to Burns’ credit) it is an 18-yearold’s, still forming, unseasoned, sardonic, frightened, unguarded. She parses hatred’s flammability: “'It’s amazing the feelings that are in you.'” And she shrewdly identifies a peculiar strain of selfthwarting love, that fears actual happiness: “All those joyful evers and infinites? Are you sure ... you could cope with the prospect of that?” “Milkman” manages to offer intervals of tenderness, and (desperately welcome) comic relief. Maybe-boyfriend’s parents desert their children to become ballroomdance superstars. Three “wee sisters” provide a sweet Greek chorus, chiming in with delicious innocence while the adults anguish and brawl. Middle sister’s brother reunites with a spurned girlfriend (see self-thwarted love, above) and when they finally kiss “[i]t was one of those ‘you’ll never be kissed like this until you smell like this’ Christmas French perfume advertisements” kisses.
Comeuppances and surprises — some utterly out of the blue — console and cheer.