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Wild Decembers

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The Junk Drawer of History

By Chris Kelly
Posted Thursday, April 13, 2000, at 11:54 AM ET

Dear Daphne,

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It's particularly interesting to me that in a novel so replete with literary references--everyone, it seems, from Shakespeare to Brontë to Joyce to O'Brien herself--that you would choose to characterize the novel as essentially a Hardyesque love story. Don't get me wrong: I do not mean to imply here that there is not ample evidence to support such a reading, only that such a reading suggests certain literary traditions and associations which I would argue speak directly not only to O'Brien's method but also to her greater (darker) purpose as well.

It sometimes seems to me that reading an O'Brien book is like getting ready for a night out on the imagined town. At times, you can almost see her in front of the mirror tugging at her blouse or twisting her buttons, adding this accessory or that, before finally deciding to try on a completely different outfit. Over the course of her career, O'Brien has expanded her wardrobe immeasurably. While I can certainly appreciate your desire to see her change less often or, as you say, allow a little more "breathing space," it seems to me that these costume changes betray neither vanity nor narrative uncertainty. Quite the contrary, in fact. For if as you would suggest, Wild Decembers finds O'Brien plowing much the same terrain, I should also like to suggest that her technique, her method of inquiry, is quite a brave departure.

Upon first reading, Decembers brought to mind Patrick Kavanagh, not so much due to any thematic similarities but rather because of Kavanagh's use of fragmentation and repetition in a work such as The Great Hunger. In this work, Kavanagh alternates between the prosaic and the baroque in his evocation of a world where language (along with everything else), is precious, dying. Kavanagh's language, like O'Brien's, becomes the base of all being: It is by turns mournful, celebrant, dark, unrelenting, and, yes, ever in search of redemption. I should also like to propose that Decembers owes much to a work like The Hollow Men, perhaps not in its achievement but certainly in its technique. Like Pound, O'Brien seems to invoke each luminous fragment much for its own sake, setting them aglow, then allowing them to take their place in a discarded world.

Which is precisely what this Cloontha is, a kind of junk drawer of history holding only discarded things, discarded facts, discarded stories, discarded lives. "Death at every turn," O'Brien says on the first page, but it is nothing so clean as that. It is, in fact, much more a book of grotesques with its a cast of physical and emotional cripples whose primeval longings ("the shepard," "the caveman") strike an uneasy balance with technological progress and romantic longings. They are, each one of them, haunted by old deep-seated rhymes of escape: They struggle with their need for home and the desire for flight. They are strangers equally to themselves and to the world they live in. How else to explain the fascination with the tractor? With pub quizzes? With violence? That the novel seems at times a bit opaque and self-possessed is no surprise; that it proceeds with a certain degree of inevitability seems to me largely beside the point. What does resonate, and loudly, beneath the incremental march of shadow set down right there on Page 1, is the indefatigable spirit of these lives. To call O'Brien a fatalist, it seems to me, is a bit like calling Beckett an existentialist. It's not that those traits aren't present in their respective works, it's just that those frames are too narrow. Perhaps what I find so exciting about O'Brien is that, like Cloontha itself, she never seems to fit on the map.