LET ME GO MAD IN MY OWN WAY

A family caught in history.

Claire O’Connor is living alone in West Ireland when her former boyfriend, Tom Morton, moves nearby. He’s writing a book about Irish men in extreme sports, he explains, and plans to conduct interviews. The two had not seen each other for a few years, ever since Claire’s mother died and, grieving and angry, she left London to return home. Tom’s arrival discomfits Claire, and sets in motion the plot of Feeney’s dark novel, which explores personal loss, intergenerational trauma, political violence, and women’s victimization in a patriarchal society. Claire struggles, at first, to decide if she wants to see Tom again: She loves him, but she doesn’t know if she can reconcile his world (well-heeled, educated England) with hers (hardscrabble rural Ireland). It’s terrifying, she reflects, “to think of all the worlds you inhabit, or once inhabited, all being in the one space for ever.” Feeney moves back and forth in time, from 2023 to the 1920s, as she traces Claire’s history in the context of Ireland’s tumultuous past. Claire grew up poor, with an angry father who abused his wife and could not accept one son’s homosexuality. Leaving home as soon as she could, she earned a doctorate and became a college teacher, hardly reconnecting with her family. Now she’s back in the family house, haunted by memories of her mother—and also by memories of famine, cruelty, and atrocities perpetrated by the British Black and Tans against the Irish a hundred years ago. Feeney confronts Claire with contemporary issues, as well: climate change, Trumpian politics, capitalism, the Covid-19 lockdown, and feminism. Alerted to the trad-wife subculture, Claire finds herself oddly fascinated by a trad wife’s bubbly internet posts. Although mostly absorbing, the narrative is marred at times by stilted dialogue.

A dramatic saga.