Molly Fox’s Birthday

MOLLY Fox’s Birthday is a disinterring of friendship that takes place in the narrator’s mind over a midsummer’s day in Dublin.

Deirdre Madden’s unnamed narrator is a playwright who shares a 30-year friendship with Molly, an acclaimed Irish actor and Belfast-born Andrew, a TV art historian.

Molly is away in New York and has lent her home to the narrator who becomes distracted from her new play on the actor’s birthday to explore her friendships. It is a beautiful home crammed with artifices, rare books and interesting furniture that serve as stimuli for the narrator’s memory to post-mortem the natures of the central people in her life.

Ardently admired by her friend and adored by many, Molly is the pivotal personality in the triangle. Haunting every scene she is portrayed as a dichotomy. Can we ever really know anyone? The book frequently asks “Who is Molly Fox?”

Layer upon layer of minutiae are stripped away but the narrator remains frustrated by her friend’s reticence.

Molly is the “magisterial Duchess of Malfi” and in her personal life she is shy, aloof and secretive.

“As was the case with Wilde himself we are at each moment in our lives the persons we were and shall become.”

Underpinning this is the question of how the interior life is defined and what connects particular people. Andrew, from a loyalist background, is haunted by the murder of his parent’s preferred brother. Molly’s mother walked out when she was seven and the narrator “was the product of a stable background but who simply couldn’t fit into it, and whose whole life and work was an effort to understand this failure to connect.”

A satisfying read, prosaic in style.