Proseography

The following review contains spoilers. They are hidden under tags, so beware!

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

Publisher: Knopf

Published: June, 2023

Pages: 304

Genres: Literary fiction, coming of age, lgbtqa+

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.

I was very conflicted about this book. The writing was very good, and I was interested in the characters, but I couldn’t understand the timeline. The story opens in the present, where a catalyst jumpstarts the plot, which takes us back to the when the main character, Rachel, is studying at university.

The problem is, the majority of the story is really only happening in the past, and except for the short opening and a handful of pages at the very end, which bring us back to the present, we stay there. This would have been fine if the book had set the reader up for this, and maybe it tried, though it didn’t feel that way to me, but I was left waiting for something else and never got it.

I suppose I was expecting past and present to intertwine and provide some further explanation and/or motivation for the characters, but this didn’t happen at all. There were only a couple of small breaks from the main plot (in the past), and there was no warning for the shift, which threw me off quite a bit. I kept having to go back and reread them to make sure I got the time frame right.

In one of those back-to-the-present moments, we get to actually (briefly) meet Rachel’s husband, who was only mentioned in passing in the opening. This was shocking to me because, by this point, we’ve been deep into her past love life and have gotten to know her exes much, much better than her husband. By the end of the book, I understood what the author had meant to do by hiding the husband’s identity until the end, but since I had already grown weary of the strangeness of the timeline, this revelation fell flat. Had there been more husband content in the present, I might not have associated him with his past self and I think I would have enjoyed the revelation a lot more. But again, the choice to have all of the major developments happen in the past robbed us of a more complex character arch.

But that’s not all. Things were structured in a confusing way even within the past. Rachel was both starting an internship and going back and forth with her ex, Carey, and we got to hear all about the relationship conflict first, and once that was done, the book went back in time to talk about the internship from the beginning. Though these two plot points were taking place simultaneously, they were not talked about at the same time. So we were unnecessarily going back to read about things that could have been dealt with all at once.

I think this book would have benefited from either having a more concrete current timeline to tie things together and give us more background on the characters and their motivations or ditching the present altogether and sticking with the past only. Eileen, by Ottessa Moshfegh, does this, and it worked perfectly fine. It felt like this novel needed a little more fine-tuning, time-wise.

The title also took forever to make sense, and after every big thing that happened, I wondered, Is this the incident? and it never was. Eventually, the title was literally spelled out in a conversation, and though I personally don’t enjoy it when the author does that, if done well, I could. The problem is that the execution felt very lukewarm, as the incident itself had already happened much earlier in the story and was pointed out by another character at the very end of the book. It might not have been the case, but this read to me like an I forgot to include this, so let me do it now type of thing.

I did enjoy seeing how the author tied Irish history into the plot. I had just finished the last season of Derry Girls when I started this book, so it was nice to see more of the history. We followed the protagonist through many years of her life, and the political background was always present in the lives of Rachel and her best friend James, portraying what it meant to be a woman and gay, respectively, during those periods with realism and nuance.

All things considered, the prose was good and humorous, and each character’s voice was very clear and interesting.

I also read the preview of Scenes of a Graphic Nature by the same author, and I really enjoyed the writing in this one too, which I’m excited to read as it seemed to have a different structure.

The picture above was taken in Derry, which isn’t really a background in this book, but it is mentioned a few times. I was obsessed with all things Irish when I was younger, and while I was studying abroad, I took a week off and went to both Dublin and Belfast, and it was one of the happiest, most peaceful times of my life.

This was taken with an iPad out of a train window because it was what I had at the time, and it’s by no means an amazing picture, but it does remind me of my own coming-of-age journey during the six months I spent abroad.