STATIONS, by Louise Kennedy
A lot of American fiction of late seems muffled and solitary, as if it has expensive noise-canceling headphones clapped over its covers. Louise Kennedy’s second novel, “Stations,” arrives like a boombox carried defiantly on someone’s shoulder through the underground railway. It’s built on dialogue, crackling with insult.
“Oh, he was a bad article.”
“What’s it to you anyway, and you spending all your time with that horrible bitch.”
“She’s a dote, your mam.”
Slang and profanity oxygenate this slim, muscular book. The F-word is found, not unpleasantly, on 108 of its 276 pages.
Kennedy, who is Irish, began writing relatively later in life, after a case of skin cancer now in remission. Her spare acknowledgments include an oncologist and “the legend who figured out how to use Chinese hamster ovary cells against melanoma.” This critic also wants to thank science and medicine for enabling a great literary talent to flourish on an unconventional schedule. (And don’t neglect the annual once-over from your dermatologist.)
“Stations” could refer to all the train travel Kennedy’s characters are doing between Ireland and England. But there are obvious other interpretations, like the junctures and impasses we all reach in life. And the Stations of the Cross; the main character, Róisín McCaffrey, is Catholic, as are many of her peers. And class and social rank. In the terminals where we gather, the line between flâneur and vagrant can be thin as tissue.
The book hews closely to Róisín, first introduced as a Didion-reading, somewhat paranoid schoolgirl in Kennedy’s short story “Belladonna,” from the pandemic-prodded 2021 collection “The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac.”
We rejoin her during a surly adolescence in 1982, just after a hunger strike escalated the Troubles. Róisín is tannically bitter about her broken family: Her dole-prone father “came home a twitching, sleepless wreck” after being recruited for the Royal Ulster Constabulary and then left her mother, shacking up with a bottle-blond dollybird in London.
Shocked to discover, during a Christmas visit from Ireland, that she has a baby half sister, Róisín flees to the Pimlico squat of a high school friend and object of her perpetual pining: Redmond Camelin, a descendant of French Huguenots whom friends call “Red.”
He is materially well-off — “I get the best of everything,” he tells her soon after meeting, showing off his new vinyl schoolbag — but obviously disturbed, self-medicating to various degrees and carnally unreachable.
“Her friendship with Red was on a higher plane than the grubby maulings of their schoolmates,” Kennedy writes, but Róisín now wants him bad and can’t figure out why he’s pushing her off, even when they’re in bed under a haze of hash.
“He wants me here but he doesn’t want me, she thought, her want for him so abject it hurt.” Instead of counting sheep, she has a wordsmithy habit of “spelling her whirling thoughts to strip them of harm,” so this becomes “HE WA NT SM EH ER EB UT HE DO ES NT WA NT ME.”
We need more depictions of female yearning, and Kennedy paints all its colors, not just Red. Their bond is the spine of the book but not, in the end, its sinew.
The action advances to 1989 and then jumps ahead to 2007, when Róisín has had several romances and become an architecture writer at a moment of maximal consumption. “Actually just writing about interiors, which are the dregs,” she tells one love interest.
Relationships have shifted, resentments have calcified, addictions have rent big holes in an already rough-hewed social fabric. “When the plants are happy, the weeds are too,” as one drunk puts it.
The political violence here is less articulated than in the story that introduced Róisín, or in Kennedy’s first novel, “Trespasses.”
“Stations” is more about the violence people inflict on themselves and those they’re supposed to care for, whether it’s chugging four miniature bottles of vodka after an encounter with an old rival who calls you Little Match Girl or rumbles of an unreported “kiddie fiddler” in a posh household.
Kennedy, a former chef, is a sensualist. Her descriptions of food, clothes, sex, the perfumes and music of the various eras — Anaïs Anaïs and Walkmans in the ’90s; lime basil and mandarin and iPods in 2007 — are matter-of-fact and perfect.
She excels at evoking the specific grottiness of unsettled domestic life: “A cold that made your nose drip constantly, that made peeing feel like passing boiling water,” or the “graying mince” that undergirds an impromptu supper with past-their-prime groceries. How a man’s kiss could be rousing even as it “tasted like a bucket of slops into which someone had emptied an ashtray.”
Róisín, by the way, means “little rose.” It also, as one character notes, sounds like the sticky stuff rubbed on the bow of string instruments, supplying the tension without which there would be little sound. With this heroine’s help, “Stations” swells like a symphony.
STATIONS | By Louise Kennedy | Riverhead | 276 pp. | $28
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