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It's no surprise that this striking, emotionally charged novel won countless awards last year. Using fractured language betraying the narrator's mental state, McBride deftly relates the story of a girl growing up in a hostile home where everyone must grapple with a pervading cancer, both literally and metaphorically. Books mentioned in this post A Girl [...]

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A few authors of contemporary literary fiction have used unconventional styles or non-grammatical constructions in writing novels, and it poses questions about the pros and cons of doing this.  A classic example may be Joyce's "Ulysses," with its stream-of-consciousness narration, which has its delights, but makes for difficult reading over the lengthy work.  Another classic example can be found in Cormac McCarthy's writing, including "All the Pretty Horses." No quotation marks enclose any of McCarthy's dialogue.  It did not seem at all distracting or confusing, and it could be said that it produced a cleaner, less busy-looking text.  Such an approach might need a closer editing by the author, however, to avoid any ambiguities for the reader.

Gathering swell of fertile bud catches whisper of Memento Mori: Remember (you have to) die, and hastens to loose unripe seed

A more complex questioning arises where an author chooses to use non-grammatical constructions, as in a recent novel, "A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing," by Eimear McBride."  In a review by Fintan O'Toole in the NY Review of Books (Nov. 20, 2014), he characterizes the book as a feminist novel. He draws on a statement made by McBride that since men had already written everything, there was, for the female novelist, "only one small plot left to tell: the terra incognito of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as men had imagined her."

In McBride's book, the thematic structure portrays a female narrator (she remains unnamed throughout the book) who, in the words of O'Toole, "cannot build a self because the foundations of her childhood have been undermined by sexual exploitation.  The central event is the rape of the narrator as a needy, rebellious thirteen-year-old by the uncle who takes advantage of her as-yet indistinct desires. It is an event she is compelled to repeat again and again in crude encounters with strangers and with the uncle who abused her."

It seems there is a lot of subjective psychology used in the review, and the book, to see the girl's actions as self-punishment ("horrible can be a good act of contrition"), but let's go on to the grammatical construction that is so unique to McBride.  In a passage quoted in the review, the girl tests any power she may have over the uncle by forcing him to replay the original rape:

So he hits til I fall over.  Crushing under.  Hits again.  He hits til something's click and the blood begins to run.  Jesus he says.  I feel sick.  But I'm rush with feeling.  Wide and.  He thinks he's bad when he fucks me now.  And so he is.  I'm better though.  In fact I am almost best.

 The cognitive and grammatical form certainly elicit anguish, despair, and revulsion in the reader, but aside from questions about how reliable a state of mind might exist in the narrator, can such form sustain a memorable reading experience over some 227 pages? Evidently it did for O'Toole.  "McBride is not playing with form, she is playing with what has yet to be fully formed: language caught in its moment of transition between thought and articulation...The brilliance of the book is that this linguistic strategy exactly parallels the struggle of the narrator, who is also trying to come into being."

I shall read the book through mostly because I'd like to better assess the overall effect of McBride's writing strategy, but I would not be pleased to find to the end an unrelieved construction of the victim mentality.  Some captivating literature has included works of protagonist as victim, though they seem to show more hope and energy of the protagonist, if not some native intelligence, in trying to find a personal salvation or epiphany.

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I did not expect to be cry at the end of Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Nor did I expect to be so devastated by the ending. I was left with tears running down my face murmuring no, no, no. I wanted to have read the ending wrong so badly I turned back and read the final few pages again which only served to make me cry even more. Even now just thinking about it I am getting a bit teary.

I’m not sure how to write about this book it is so good. You have probably heard it is not an easy read. The style is challenging but it is beautiful. It has its own rhythms. And even though the sentences are often short and incomplete, it does not feel choppy at all and even is lyrical:

What’s. See it spin. Look around. What if. I could. I could make. A whole other world a whole civilization in this city that is not home? The heresy of it. But I can. And I can choose this. Shafts of sun. Life that is this. And I can. Laugh at it because the world goes on. And no one cares. And no one’s falling into hell. I can do. Puke the whole lot up.

The narrator of the story is the unnamed girl of the title. We begin when she hasn’t even been born yet. The language of the book here is marvelous and difficult and confusing and exactly conveys a sense of being in utero (at least as we can imagine it).

Most of the time the girl is addressing the you who is her brother, two years older than she is. Her brother, before she was born, had a brain tumor. The doctors removed it but his brain was damaged and they can’t promise that the tumor won’t someday return. She loves her brother dearly but the damage is such that he is never able to live on his own and work at anything besides stocking shelves. In spite of how much the narrator loves her brother he is equally as frustrating, especially when they reach their teens and go to a new school. The teenage world is a savage place and she struggles between wanting to protect her brother and throw him to the sharks.

Their father left when they were small and they are raised by a devoutly Catholic mother. Mammy is very protective of her son and has a tendency to take out her frustrations over his disability on her daughter. She frequently tells her daughter she is no good and nothing but trouble. Combine this with the girl’s uncle raping her in the kitchen when she was thirteen and it seems nearly inevitable that the girl tries hard to really be no good. While she does well in school she starts having sex with any boy who asks. Sex becomes a way to punish herself but it also serves as a substitute for the emotional pain she does not know how to deal with. Eventually she escapes home and goes off to college where she and her roommate regularly go out, drink too much and pick up men.

Just when it seems she might be starting to figure things out, her uncle shows up again and sends her spiraling out of control. When her brother’s tumor returns it is almost more than she can bear.

I have managed to make this book sound really depressing, haven’t I? It’s not depressing. It is raw and disturbing and uncomfortable. It is beautiful and heartbreaking. Now and then it is joyful. By turns I wanted to yell at the narrator, laugh, or wrap her in my arms and hold her tight. I cheered for her to find a way through her pain and dreaded that she never be able to.

You may have heard McBride wrote this book ten years ago when she was twenty-seven. It took nine years for her to find a publisher. I am glad a publisher finally decided to take a chance on Girl. It is an extraordinary book.

Filed under: Books, Reviews Tagged: Eimear McBride

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I took O Level English Literature at a girls' grammar school in 1979. We studied three texts: Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford; E M Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Midsummer's

Night's Dream.  A play by the ultimate English writer, and two texts connected only by their utter Englishness.
I found the detailed social history contained in Flora Thompson's memoir of life in rural England completely tedious. Forster's examination of Edwardian snobbery and xenophobia in Forster's novel was somewhat baffling, sixteen-year-old girls not being best placed to appreciate a story about a middle-aged woman's lust for a younger man (Eeeuw, yuck, disgusting). Re-reading it, 35 years later I was surprised to find it laugh-out-loud funny.
 I didn't enjoy English Literature O level, but I was good at it, and that was why I continued on to A level, which I found much more rewarding, with its wider (but still 100% English...not even British) texts.
Around the same time my husband received a reading list from his school. It included 22 plays, including contemporary works (Arnold Wesker's Roots, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey), four plays by George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, and Sophocles' Antigone.  For W Shakespeare the list read 'Any Play'.
The list for prose was longer -  44 books. They included plenty of nineteenth century novels: Jane Austen, Brontes C and E, two novels by Dickens and one by Hardy.
There were many twentieth century texts, British, American and translated : Anne Frank's Diary; Of Mice and Men (and another Steinbeck), To Kill a Mocking Bird. George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984; Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice and The Pied Piper, Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, D H Lawrence Sons and Lovers.
The list covered many genres -  science fiction (Day of the Triffids); romance (Pride and Prejudice); historical fiction (Rosemay Sutcliff's Warrior Scarlet); memoir( Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals), dystopian fiction (Fahrenheit 451); mystery (Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair) a western (Shane by Jack Shaefer) and a thriller (Alistair McLean's The Guns of Navarone).  There were several true-life stories from the Second World War, one by a Polish writer, one by an Italian and Alan Burgess's novel A Small Woman about a British missionary in China.
This list was clearly designed to be as broad as possible, introducing pupils to classic works of literature and inviting them to find out what sort of book they enjoy. It was challenging, interesting, reflecting different social classes and nationalities, as well as ethnic minority groups.
Should schools find this extensive list too short, there was a note: 'Candidates from Schools whose extended lists have been approved by the Board may, of course, refer in addition to texts on these lists.'  My husband remembers that pupils were told to read at least five or six of the 66 texts on the list, but he read at least 20, some in class, some from the local library. The final examination at the end of the course asked generic questions such as: 'Write about strong characters in some of the books you have read.'
This list  fostered a love of  reading in my husband which eventually led him to read English Literature at Oxford University.
The really interesting thing is that he was taking CSE English at a Secondary Modern school, a school to which he had been condemned by failing the 11 plus. CSEs were widely seen as useless qualifications for thickies, but I would contend that anyone who was given that list and had a crack at reading six books on it, would find something  enjoyable and challenging to read which might inspire them to read more in the future.

Our daughter took GCSE English recently, studying anthologies of poetry and short stories, a few scenes from Macbeth and Of Mice and Men; a syllabus which seemed to be designed for kids with short concentration spans. Of Mice and Men was the only text she read that ran to any length at all - all 107 pages of it. I have nothing against Steinbeck's classic, and certainly nothing against Macbeth, I am sure that the anthologies contained good material, but I have to admit to a great deal of parental frustration as I watched my daughter thoroughly turned off by this thin fare, and irritated by being asked to compare World War One poetry with Macbeth, an exam question that she found pointless and off-putting. .
I am writing this, of course, because of the recent kerfuffle over GCSE English, a row in which facts got lost to prejudice (for and against Michael Gove, for and against American literature, for and against Dickens and other nineteenth century authors).
Depending on who you read, Gove had personally interfered to ban books, or had bravely intervened to widen the curriculum, or Gove had nothing to do with any of it. As the saying goes, fools rush in, where angels fear to tread: it seemed as though the way the changes to GCSE English were reported and discussed was designed to make everyone look foolish (a Machiavellian plot by Gove himself, perhaps?)
I watched the row develop with increasing frustration, as it had so little to do with the actual crisis facing British children's literacy. Libraries are closing! Schools are being designed without libraries! Reading is being re-defined as deciphering phonics! School library services are closing! Children are spending more and more time glued to screens and less and less time reading for pleasure! These are the real crises, not whether Of Mice and Men remains on the school syllabus.
 When I read that Bailey's Prize winner Eimear McBride wants to spend some of her £30,000 prize money buying copies of Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird to give free to teenagers, I want to scream. These books haven't been banned, Eimear! Schools have so many copies that they will, no doubt, find a way of using them, perhaps by teaching them to Y9 pupils.  Instead, please give your money to the Siobhan Dowd Trust which has the simple and essential aim of promoting the love of reading among disadvantaged children and young adults.
Yesterday the review section of The Guardian newspaper asked a select group of authors and academics to pick GCSE texts (no librarians, English teachers or children's writers among them). The choice that make me giggle the most was put forward by Linda Grant: Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth. And the one with which I agreed  whole-heartedly was Hilary Mantel:
Should we play the Gove game, by setting up opposing lists? Or should we ask, which Gradgrind thought up the idea of set texts in the first place? Why should students be condemned to thrash to death a novel or a corpus of poetry, week after week, month after month? No novel was ever penned to puzzle and punish the young. Plays are meant to be played at. Poetry is not written for Paxmanites. Literature is a creative discipline, not just for writer but for reader. Is the exam hall its correct context? We educate our children not as if we love them but as if we need to control and coerce them, bullying them over obstacles and drilling them like squaddies; and even the most inspired and loving teachers have to serve the system. We have laws against physical abuse. We can try to legislate against emotional abuse. So why do we think it's fine to abuse the imagination, and on an industrial scale? What would serve children is a love of reading, and the habit of it. I wonder if the present system creates either.

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