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Wild Decembers

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Incessant Swooning Lyricism

By Daphne Merkin
Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2000, at 6:59 PM ET

Dear Chris,

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I had an odd sense while reading your reactions to the novel--especially concerning the creation of the quintessentially Irish Cloontha as a counterweight to O'Brien's own exile from Ireland--that your interpretation was more complex than the actual book at hand. Wild Decembers is essentially a Hardyesque love story, in which the landscape is every bit as significant as the characters, told through a scrim of nostalgia. It begins and ends as an elegy--to lost connections, lost family ties, loss of meaning, the lost possibility of romance. The pull of a dark fatality is everywhere in it. O'Brien has always been a natural elegist, pining for something or other, hasn't she? Not that I mean to be unsympathetic: The Love Object still lingers in my mind as one of the best evocations of the end of a love affair I have read, and I've intermittently liked a lot of her other fiction. I was very moved by the novel--it was either the last one or the one before the last--in which a son drowns. But in this book she seems to be gilding her own lily, if you know what I mean, living off the fat of her own well-endowed imagination. (Gad, I'm beginning to sound O'Brienesque.) Oh, I don't mean that there aren't compelling aspects to the novel: the relationship between the docile, lovely Breege and her bitter, withdrawn, and ultimately crazy brother, Joseph; Bugler, the intruder with the tractor who poaches on Joseph's land and thereby destroys his last haven in a heartless world, strikes me as a great character, in the tradition of the silent, erotically seething male (I kept envisioning him played by the young Brando). Some of the scenes are remarkably well observed, such as the one at Josephine's hair salon where different segments of society--Breege and Lady Halifax, for whom she does laundry--converge. The scene at Nelly's Bar where Joseph gets into a brawl with Bugler also seems convincing in its details, as does Joseph's futile visit to his grandfather's solicitors. I even kind of liked Bugler's aggressive fiancee, Rosemary, with her long red nails and her sexual know-how--in spite of the fact that she seemed to walk in from another book.

But something about the novel struck me as contrived, as though it were coming from an emotional source that O'Brien is so used to drawing on that by now she does it automatically. Perhaps it is no more than that I found myself resisting O'Brien's overripe prose, the incessant swooning lyricism of it. Admittedly, this very style is what has brought her literary kudos, but she used to allow a little more breathing space between one metaphor and the next, alternating a certain starkness--of sentiment or phrasing--with the rich expressionism of her language. I found myself wading through many of the descriptive passages, impatient to get to a stringent perception rather than a dusky emotion. As I wrote in a piece about my father (excuse my quoting of myself), I live for emotions, but O'Brien seems to write about little else. There's something very moving about the doomed affair between Breege Bugler, but it has a fablelike quality that isn't all to the good. Unlike Jean Rhys, for instance, where the self-destruction of the characters seems to click with the potential for self-destruction in me the reader, I felt very much on the outside looking in while reading Wild Decembers. Its passions stir the pages, but they don't linger on in one's own life, like the passions of Coetzee's characters in Disgrace. I think this has to do, again, with O'Brien's fatalism. Nothing to do about the tragic skein of Irish lives, never was, never will be.