Straying

December 11, 2017
This slow-burning novel by McCloskey (When Light Is Like Water) is a moving meditation on rootlessness and love. Alice, a young American traveling alone in 1980s Ireland, is tending bar in a small town when she meets Eddie. In short order, they fall in love, get married, and buy a house, and soon their relationship begins to falter. When Alice meets a writer who, in his recklessness and self-consciousness, seems like Eddie’s opposite, she begins an affair. When Eddie finds out and leaves her, and the writer dumps her, Alice no longer feels welcome among her neighbors and leaves Ireland. Years later, after working for international NGOs in Sri Lanka, Kosovo, Kenya, and Somalia, Alice learns that her mother has died and, instead of returning to the States and the home she left long ago, she returns to Dublin. The narrative is split between the two time periods, with both Alice’s memories and her present-day actions tinged by bittersweet nostalgia, as she tries to understand how some loves diminish and what makes a place home. McCloskey is a keen, sympathetic observer; her tight, controlled prose meticulously details Alice’s honest consideration of her flaws and desires. The melancholic complexity of Alice’s very human struggle carries this elegant novel with no easy answers.

December 15, 2017
McCloskey burrows inside the ruminations of a middle-aged American woman returning to Ireland, where she lived as a young woman, to confront memories of her failed marriage.Raised in Oregon by her loving single mother, Alice first came to Ireland on an adventurous whim in the late 1980s when she was 24 but left after her divorce. Years later, she is working for an Irish NGO in Kenya when her mother dies. At emotional loose ends, she returns to Ireland. Ostensibly there to write a report on her refugee work, unsure how long she'll stay, Alice begins sorting through memories of her earlier time in Ireland: working at a pub in Sligo and hanging out with a bohemian crowd before meeting and falling in love with furniture importer Eddie, a gentle, solid man of few words. Alice, who barely knew her father, was drawn to the cocoon of safety and love Eddie provided despite her "flashes of doubt" about his verbal reticence. Once married, Alice found herself veering between loving contentment and emotional claustrophobia, resenting yet seduced by the "ready-made role" of conventional wife. She worked half-heartedly as a journalist while the couple's social life revolved around Eddie's friends and family. Then she fell into a mindlessly passionate affair with Cauley, a writer with a burgeoning career. The story of the affair and its impact on Alice's marriage offers few surprises, but McCloskey excels in weaving Alice's twin griefs over her lost marriage--Eddie has remarried and become a father--and her mother's death into her present life as a solitary woman willing to accept the choices she has made. Despite the importance of the men in Alice's life, the novel's heart lies with Alice's mother, a woman who loved her daughter fiercely, married for the first time in her 50s, and found a happiness that has so far eluded Alice.Elegant prose and nuanced self-awareness, reminiscent of early Edna O'Brien, enhance this intensely focused story of memory and self-imposed loss.

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