A BEAUTIFUL LOAN

An Irishwoman reflects on her romantic entanglements and spiritual awakening.

“My name is Anna, and for some time now, I have been trying to account for certain events in my life…which, from this vantage point of forty-five years, I often find baffling.” So commences Anna Hughes’ look back at her life, starting when she was 19, living in a Dublin bedsit, and about to begin her first job as a schoolteacher. The first of the “certain events” to which the middle-aged Anna alludes concerns her relationship with Peter Gallagher, an accountant she met at a nightclub. For Anna, their romance was meaningful (Peter was her first lover), insecurity-making (Anna secretly rifled through his things), and consuming: “I yearn to know him fully, deeply—I have no other mission.” Their relationship proceeded the way one might expect, which is emblematic of a problem throughout this careful, searching novel: Readers will always be one step ahead of Anna. Late in the book, when she finally realizes, “I’m easily swayed by other people’s ideas and opinions, believing them to be superior to my own,” readers will likely have a “No kidding” ready to go. There are wisps of an Edna O’Brien character in Anna, a country girl coming into awareness in the big city, and there are glimmers of a promising story about the lure of the extraordinary life versus the comforts of an ordinary one. But the narrative is bogged down with Anna’s thoughts on her dreams and on Jung, Camus, and, while she’s seeing a Muslim man, Islam. This only reinforces the notion that, while Anna is intellectually voracious, she doesn’t have an original thought in her head. That may be the novel’s point, but it does make for a tiresome protagonist.

May speak to readers who are spiritually seeking; will likely frustrate those who aren’t.