Misery outweighs merit in account of rural life

DÓNAL RYAN’S eagerly awaited second novel exemplifies the problem with much literary fiction in this country: it has ceased to be enjoyable. This is not to say that the work is artistically inadequate, indeed the opposite is true, often to a literal fault, but instead the conflation of merit with misery has been to the genre’s detriment. Too many Irish novelists seem to have only partially absorbed the lessons of their predecessors, recreating the aesthetic values of, say, McGahern’s prose, but not his measured approach to narrative or his careful respect for the reader’s credulity.
In the case of The Thing About December, this ensures that a very beautiful, very carefully wrought master-class in literary writing, sure to be highly praised by many, is also a novel which, as a reading experience, veers from the unpleasant to the unintentionally ridiculous.