Montpelier Parade

Starred review from June 5, 2017
Geary enters the literary arena with a bang: this debut about an unconventional love affair between a teenage boy and an older woman is unassuming but gorgeously rendered. Set in 1980s working-class Dublin and told in the second-person point of view, the quiet, sensitive story follows Sonny as he slogs from school to his part-time job at the butcher shop to home, where he’s the youngest of many brothers and his exhausted mother is cooking yet another meal while criticizing Sonny’s gambling father under her breath. Besides sneaking out to smoke cigarettes at a cluster of rocks called the Cat’s Den with his only acquaintance, a sexually promiscuous dropout named Sharon, Sonny spends most of his nonworking hours worrying about his mom, trying to placate his dad, stealing bike parts, getting drunk, and wandering along the canal at night—until he meets Vera, an educated, posh British woman who lives alone in the house he and his laborer father are repairing. From the moment he lays eyes on her, Sonny is smitten, and the affair that develops slowly over the course of the book is both deeply nuanced and utterly convincing. Geary has an ear for snappy dialogue, and the economic strains on Sonny’s family are keenly felt throughout the book. Above all, it’s the combination of Sonny’s unwitting innocence and Vera’s inescapable sadness that makes their connection—and the novel—brilliant and heartbreaking. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners.

June 15, 2017
The debut novel from screenwriter and actor Geary, set a generation ago in Dublin, depicts a dark, sad, doomed, and deeply unconventional love affair.Sonny Knolls is a working-class teenager who earns extra money as a dogsbody at a butcher's shop after school and on the weekend helps his father, a small-time handyman. On one such occasion, as father and son shore up a homeowner's wall in the tony area that gives the novel its title, Sonny encounters their employer, a middle-aged woman named Vera whose haunted, ethereal beauty--partly bound up in her seeming an alien from the far-off land of Posh and Prosperous--makes an immediate and indelible impression. Sonny begins to contrive ways to see her again, reasons to return to her trim and lovely house. His own neighborhood is grimy, his family life bleakly unpromising; Sonny's father is a crank and a gambler, his mother meek, resentful, but long-suffering; it's the sort of family in which communication, if one has to indulge in such, is guilt-ridden, stunted, laconic, furtive. Geary skillfully captures the milieu and establishes Sonny's hapless sense of where he's headed: blackout drinking, petty theft, expulsion from school, a meat-cutting apprenticeship he'll be lucky to keep, a life of grim hanging on. Vera, who has formidable troubles of her own with depression, is likewise drawn (there are hints of a precipitating mystery and shame here, but there's no way to put it together until the end) to the sensitive, vulnerable, good-looking teenager, and before long the tension between them explodes into an erotic clinch that, she tells him, he'll eventually hate her for. That Geary makes this romantic relationship feel genuine and even touching, as well as unsettling and a little creepy, is one of the book's several merits. A relentlessly downbeat but often poignant novel about flawed and despairing lovers testing--and transgressing--border walls of various kinds.

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