The Unspeakable Longing that Moves the World

Rachel Connolly’s debut novel is full of funny, precisely captured moments that float in a void created by the death of the protagonist’s best friend.

Lazy City
by Rachel Connolly
Liveright, 288 pp., $16.95

LAZY CITY, RACHEL CONNOLLY’S debut novel, is a book about Belfast, grief, and the insides of bars and churches. The first time it made me laugh out loud was during a scene that had Erin, the unmoored twentysomething protagonist, chatting with an American over drinks.

The American is talking about how expensive his rent was, how inescapable it is, how it has spread to the rural upstate areas, even. There are literally no neighbourhoods which haven’t been full-scale gentrified, he says. We’re talking nothing. Does not exist. He swipes his hands across the air for effect. Declan nods but I can see he is finding it boring, his eyes are glazed. He wants to hear about the good bits. We know about gentrification, we even have that here. But how to ask? You can’t just say, stop talking about your rent, it’s boring.

It’s a deftly rendered version of a minor bar dynamic: the scraped acquaintance who is not offensive enough to snub, yet neither conversationally adept nor interpersonally close enough for a real rhythm of mutual enjoyment to form. In this downside of the bar’s unique possibilities of informal and ephemeral camaraderie, you can find yourself going through the chat with a robotic friendliness, longing only for the peace of five minutes ago, too committed now to recover it. For me, at least, the ridiculous disjunction between outer complaisance and inner impotence can build to a frenzied desire to seize my interlocutor by the throat and shake vigorously—especially when some very serious and generically significant topic recurs for the thousandth time: Stop talking about your rent! It’s boring!

Lazy City is full of moments like these: finely observed bar dynamics, deflating ironies, lacerating deadpan observations, well-lit miniatures of mutual asymmetrical exploitation. The American wants a coterie of exotically authentic Belfast youngsters who find him cool—“You don’t get places like this” in New York, he complains. “You know, it’s more. It feels. It feels.” The word he’s searching for is “authentic.”—Declan and Erin want to hear about New York, not New York rents. These moments are the novel’s meat and potatoes. The deeper emotional currents pushing these characters provide the book with more of a setting than a plot; they do not move things forward so much as they hold things still—creating a space and a moment in which we can watch Erin circling, circling.

Erin is circling, as we slowly come to understand, around the death of her best friend. There are other eddies—most notably, her estranged and embittered mother—but it is the death of her friend that sets in motion her flight from her flat, from her graduate research program, from the forward momentum of her life as an educated and unattached young woman. She drops out of her program—maybe for now, maybe forever—then takes up an informal mother’s-helper job with a well-to-do acquaintance, and drifts. “I get on with Annie Marie well enough. It’s a comfortable situation. I get time to myself during the day. . . . I haven’t been doing it long enough to hate it.”

She drifts into churches, into dreary sex (both parties saying the words they learned from pornography), into a situationship with an old flame. And she drinks, a lot. Connolly lovingly notes each pint, each glass of wine, each of the “not quite cold gin and tonics” that make Erin feel nauseated. “Maybe he wouldn’t talk [in smut],” she figures to herself, “if he wasn’t drunk, but we probably wouldn’t be here if we weren’t drunk.” The effect of this inventorying is to provide a kind of narrative punctuation. It’s not self-destructive or compulsive alcoholic drinking, exactly; it’s a particular kind of unsustainable drinking you can do when you are merely very young, or, more often, when you have fallen into the space between different versions of your life—drinking to mark time, to have a kind of project for your days, to give shape to the hours between the hangover and meeting friends at the pub. ( “In the morning, I feel terrible; feeling terrible in the morning is becoming a habit.” ) In these transitional periods, you might feel, to yourself, as if you were steadily dissolving into insubstantiality—but the pub is real. The laughter is real. The friends are real. The chat is real. The pint is real. And it keeps you just real enough.

There are hints and moments when we see that this kind of drifting is not all that ever was, all that could be, for Erin. Her confrontations with her mother are electrifying, stripping away Erin’s critical distance, her habitual half-shrug mental posture, and transforming her into a thrum of anger and hatefulness: “Our arguments have a primordial quality. One of us says something or gives a certain look, and it’s like an ancient signal has been activated. . . . Sniping, insults. Both clambering around in the wreckage of a lifetime of old arguments and unresolved issues.” 

A scene in which (once again in a church) she relives the memory of a day’s adventure with her deceased friend cracked the novel open for me. Erin is aimless, removed, living in grayscale. But her memories show something different—a world of color, and laughter, and the high-flying idiocies of youth, and, above all, self-directing movement: in memory, Erin and her friend take a trip together.

It’s a small thing, and perhaps the adventures of Erin’s memory are not so different, in terms of hard specifics, from the languid picaresque that she enacts around the self-contained circuit of Belfast. But it feels like a different world. It is, in fact, another world—one ordered on its axis by the polar magnetism of another person with whom to share it. By the novel’s opening, that person is gone, and so is the world. That’s what loss does.

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IT’S NOT QUITE TRUE THAT this is simply a novel about loss, though. It’s a novel that wants to spend time in the interstices of life, in the void between the destruction of a former world and the beginning of a new one. The moments in which we glimpse a more vivid past clarify what the book’s project is—they suggest that the ennui hanging over the book like a leaden sky isn’t simply a given—but the fact that the precipitating destruction is the loss of a friend is almost incidental. It could have been all kinds of things. As Erin’s mother tells her in one of their wonderful, terrible, caged-animal exchanges, “You aren’t the first person to have had something bad happen to them.” (Connolly typically uses italics instead of quotation marks to indicate both verbatim dialogue and Erin’s inner monologue throughout the book.)

Why write a novel about the plotless interstices of life? Well, for one reason, by some perverse design, that is where a lot of life happens. Lazy City is as much a study of life in Belfast—the eponymous lazy city—as anything else. It is one of the book’s treats: getting to see this particular city in its little rhythms, its rising and falling voices, its weather and scars, through the eyes of someone who loves it.

At one point, she notes the ludicrousness of the requisite aspirational-global-Manhattan design of an upscale flat dropped into the material context of its Ormeau Road location. 

I walk over to where Mikey is standing, looking out the giant window. It runs almost the entire length of the room, leaving about a hand span of wall at each end, and from waist height to the ceiling, like something out of an aquarium. I can’t help but laugh at the view. The convenience shop across the street, with half the lights on its sign out, Fuck IRA scum spray-painted in black on the red-brick wall. Red, white and blue kerbstones and orange and purple flags further down the road. An Ormeau Road flat pretending it’s a penthouse suite. 

He asks what I’m laughing at. What am I? This thing of everything in the world having to be the same. And the way some things never change, at the same time.

The love evinced in the novel is not without complications, which you could, in part, chalk up to the ambivalence Erin expresses about Belfast’s fraught history—but then, nobody loves their home without complications. Your particular complications are the shape of your home.

There’s a sense, too, that the caught-between place that Erin inhabits extends far beyond her private version of it. Erin is Catholic in the way that the rest of her peers are, in roughly the same way that lots of people I knew growing up are: not a believer, not shaping her life around it in any of the basic ways, but still not not Catholic. Returning to her childhood church, Erin finds “the incense here smells sweet like it does nowhere else, like they’re burning fresh roses in the basement.”

Maybe you haven’t been to confession since you graduated high school and you’re far from the Church’s official positions on various social issues, but you still can’t bring yourself to eat meat on a Friday in Lent. Erin wouldn’t go to a regular Sunday Mass, but she can’t stay out of churches, and she can’t stop praying. This can be a lazy way to live. But it can be a hard way, too: cut off from the consolations, from the hope and the solid ground a robust faith provides, but unable to give yourself to something new. There’s just a gap where there once was something, and you need the gap. To not live with the gap would signal another kind of irretrievable and unimaginable loss.

As sometimes happens in life, when Erin’s time of drifting ends, it is not because of a new movement of the will, but a kind of change of season. Threads wind themselves up, new clarity reshapes old situations, small currents pull you into new channels. Time to move on. But not all the changes are external and impersonal. In the novel’s final scene, Erin is once more in the church, talking to God, talking to herself, reflecting on her life with the kind of distance and perception that a period of staying in place can sometimes give you. She considers herself, running away from her own life, and she considers the others whose paths have crossed hers, each with their own muddle. She considers the kingdom of heaven, and the terrible longing lurking behind ordinary choices, ordinary problems.

I think of Mikey, always with another girl, then another one, and then going back to the first one, never telling anyone exactly what he is doing, not even knowing himself, probably; and of Matt, both the Matts, with the drinking and drugs, dropping out all the time, moving away, leaving his family and the book he might write one day, maybe; and Anne Marie, with her beautiful house, then houses, and getting divorced to start again and then deciding she didn’t want that after all; and her boys always with their screens instead of whatever is going on around them; and my mum, who wishes I was different but can’t seem to let me go, even though she must know I can’t be; even Declan, entering his paintings into competition after competition, because every new one might be the one which would start it all off. Maybe this is all the same thing. That same longing.

She says to God, “Why is it so hard to imagine? And why do any of us look to this thing, your kingdom, if we don’t know what it is? Why have so many people, forever, wanted something they can’t imagine?”

Erin cannot wholeheartedly believe in the kingdom of heaven, or name anything else as the true object of the great longing, or put her hope in any but vague and uncertain ways for its fulfillment. But she can see herself, in retrospect, as running, not drifting. And she can be tender with the others who are also running, sometimes in circles, all of them responding to the same unspeakable longing.

And she does two more things before she steps out of the church into chilly Belfast air. She asks for forgiveness. And she offers thanksgiving.

There are worse ways to make a beginning.