THIRST TRAP, by Gráinne O’Hare
Maggie, Harley and Róise are out on the town. Their night follows what seems to be an established pattern: MDMA in the club toilets, dancing to B*witched and ABBA, tequila shots, a return trip to the toilets to be sick and, finally, some ill-advised hookups.
They’re supposed to be celebrating Róise’s 30th birthday, but in reality they’re drowning their sorrows — mourning the end of their 20s as well as the loss of their fourth flatmate, Lydia. In a few hours they’ll drag their hangovers to her memorial Mass.
These three young women are facing a reckoning, having traveled with Lydia as a pack through school and university and into the foothills of the adult world. But as they enter their 30s, they’re still stuck in unfulfilling starter jobs in hospitality and office admin, paychecks just about covering the rent on their shared house in south Belfast. The house has black mold in the bathroom and dry rot under the stairs, a metaphor for all the other things in their lives that might be breaking down and falling apart — including the group’s friendship itself.
A thirst trap is a suggestive or attention-seeking social media post, and, like our protagonists, this novel puts up quite a front. There’s so much cheerful sassy brio in the opening pages of Gráinne O’Hare’s debut — an attempt to bring a cactus into a nightclub, an account of a pole-dancing injury, a throwaway mention of “Harley getting off with two cast members from a touring production of ‘Cats’” — that you might assume you’re in for a fun social comedy, one of those lighthearted coming-of-age novels in which hot messes bid a fond farewell to girlhood and are then promoted to adult life, a state summed up by Róise as “mortgages and gardens and babies.”
But something bleaker and more desperate is happening here. The novel is full of garrulous, apparently forthright characters who have either forgotten how to communicate with one another or simply can’t find the right words. The opening nightclub scene, when people strain to hear and be heard over the music, is fairly representative. Later on, rather than directly asking Róise whether she’s OK, Maggie checks to see which Taylor Swift album she’s listening to on Spotify. (It’s “Red”; and she’s not.)
Lydia has abandoned them to their shared grief, but she has also left each one a particular personalized legacy of guilt and regret. These uncomfortable feelings, piled on top of family tragedies, bad breakups and furtive eating disorders, are too painful to acknowledge. Easier to pour another drink and do another line. The characters may assure themselves they’re having a high old time but we aren’t fooled. It doesn’t seem like that much fun, knocking back leftover prosecco at 10 a.m.
For much of the novel, our fierce yet vulnerable protagonists are stuck in a doom loop of partying and comedowns, always on the run from reality. There’s a risk of monotony here, but O’Hare’s writing is bright and energetic, and often very funny. Cate, with whom Maggie is having an on-off fling, “attends house parties with the air of a touring foreign dignitary whom the organizers have been privileged to host.” When Harley’s hotel-manager boss scolds her for taking overpriced bottled water off a guest’s bill, she retorts: “What am I meant to do, tell them they’re drinking Enya’s tears?”
Things inevitably get worse before they get better, but by the final stretch the friends have found a way of moving on, and not just to a new, and newly decorated, rental. We are nowhere near mortgages and gardens and babies — Maggie has signed up for a 5K park run, Harley has finally passed her grade school piano exam and Róise has a new job offer — but it looks as if O’Hare’s chaotic and engaging characters may have stumbled on something resembling a sense of direction. Even if in the end it still takes them straight to the pub.
THIRST TRAP | By Gráinne O’Hare | Crown | 288 pp. | $28
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