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Every so often, a novel comes around that makes you excited about reading again. For me, this year that is Caroline O’Donoghue’s gripping, moving The Rachel Incident, which looks like it could be branded the book of the summer. Nodding surely to Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers in its title, and to Joni Mitchell in the name of its love interest, Carey – Mitchell’s “mean old daddy” – The Rachel Incident is about a woman living in Cork in her early 20s who wants her life to be, like those of Amis and Mitchell, romantic and novelistic – until those romantic and novelistic happenings catch up with her and become a little too real.
Although the book’s main love story is platonic, between our protagonist and narrator Rachel and her closeted gay best friend James, the central drama concerns her college professor, Fred Byrne, whom she takes a shine to at the beginning. It turns out he prefers James – and Rachel becomes involved in their lies in a way she couldn’t quite have predicted.
This is a book about being young – about heartbreak, hope and uncertainty – and it is infused with the same intensity that seems to permeate everything when you are 21, and your life sprawls out ahead of you as though the lights have just dimmed at the cinema. But while these themes are universal, O’Donoghue is also interested in circumstance and context – the way that the culture of a particular time affects a character, which makes sure The Rachel Incident is not a lofty coming-of-age novel but a taut exploration of what it meant to be young in the 2010s, when the book is set.
And O’Donoghue, who has written two novels for adults and a young adult trilogy, and is known for her pop culture podcast Sentimental Garbage, is acutely aware of how the discourse of the time, from slut-shaming to the recession, affected young people. Rachel is telling the story of her years from 20 to 21 looking back from her early 30s – the age O’Donoghue is now – and so her insights are both personal and detached. “Courtship, to me, was about text messages,” she writes at one point. “It was about sending a good-morning and a good-night message. It was ending every text with an x, or three x’s, or a long line of them when you were really pleased.”
The book is full of these: witty insights that get you right to the heart of the character. Rachel is self-absorbed and naïve but we sympathise with her as her youthful attempts to curate herself as a romantic heroine by trying to seduce her professor tie her in knots.
O’Donoghue’s podcast masterfully unpacks “trashy” culture to reveal its significance, and readers will find plenty of pleasing 2010s references here – Topshop, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Facebook, the colour teal. But this is not just millennial nostalgia: The Rachel Incident gently nudges us to think about the forces underlying the atmosphere of the time. Beneath Rachel and James’s small-scale dramas there is poverty, homophobia, the question of abortion. Rachel, a middle-class liberal, cannot quite understand why James would want to stay in the closet; James’s reluctance to come out is not overly interrogated but sits steadfastly at the centre of the plot. It dawns on Rachel later on that another character would rather be seen as “abusive and corrupt” than admit they were bisexual.
Like Amis’s, O’Donoghue’s prose flows with an easy patter, and like Mitchell, she draws beauty out of the everyday – such as when Rachel and James’s new friendship, cemented by a Simon and Garfunkel song stuck on repeat, “wandered around the house like a sticky, curious foal”. O’Donoghue is a funny, smart, fearless voice who strikes the perfect balance of realism and romance, and The Rachel Incident is a stormer of a novel.
The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue (Virago, £16.99)
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