Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is her first novel. And it's a modern novel -- in every sense of that work.McBride foregoes quotation marks and elides verbiage for sense, sound and sheer appearance on the page. For emphasis it occasionally wreaks havoc on capItalS and reverses letter order. It is, in all respects, a heresy -- which is to say, this is a modern classic. And it's a real joy.
Because, at the heart of this story, we have childhood innocence. And its loss.
From the earliest pages, McBride opts for a first-person heroine-narrator who drinks, takes drugs and enjoys -- but is traumatized by -- sex. She's a lapsed Catholic, and always a cowed but dutiful daughter. She tells us all this -- obliquely -- even while there's one thing she never tells us: Her name.
Because "A Girl" always comes before any name. The narrator speaks from the womb, as she's about to be delivered to a kind but careworn mother and an absentee father: "Thinking I think of you and me. Our empty spaces where fathers should be. Whenabouts we might find them and what we'd do to fill them up." The "you" being addressed is not the reader, as it might appear, but the narrator's brother, two or three years older, and afflicted with a brain tumor. If it's initially daunting to sift this prose for its relationships and even identities, it's because McBride insists that familial intimacy inheres linguistically too; this is how we all speak to our own loved ones, and about them to ourselves.
So it takes a couple of chapters for the reader to be initiated into the intimacies of that relationship. In that way, "A Girl" exposes us to the complexities of language and relationships in the modern world.
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a complicated book -- but it's worth every minute of negotiating those complexities. This is destined to be a modern classic.
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I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.