The release of Belinda McKeon’s second novel Tender has met with much fanfare, John Boyne calling it ‘the best Irish novel I’ve read since The Spinning Heart’. Following 17 year old Catherine Reilly as she navigates college life, the novel is about much more than the straightforward development of the character, figuring sexuality, obsession, and irony among its themes. Totally Dublin met with award-winning Irish writer Belinda McKeon to discuss the timely nature of her new novel, and address how autobiographical Tender really is.
Both your books feature Trinity College as a setting.
I almost didn’t notice that [Trinity] was in both books. I was so concentrated on the characters in this one that it came as a surprise to me to realise that I’d accidentally set another novel in the same place. I suppose that it did make a big impact on me. I went there when I was 17, it was a hugely mind-expanding experience for me. I had a very good time, but also I changed enormously as a person. So it probably is a natural well for me, as a place in which to put characters. Especially because [in Tender] these were two young people: one of them is a student there, one of them is not, but he’s so dependent on Catherine in a way that it becomes his stomping ground as well.
Did you study Creative Writing with Deirdre Madden while at Trinity?
Yes I did. She was the Writer in Residence in 1997, when I started. I took her [class] once a week for a term, on a Monday evening I think, in her rooms. It was great, but a bit of a shock to the system. I was 17, it was my first ever experience of a creative writing workshop of any kind. I’d come up through school writing stories and nobody was reading them, but anybody who did read them was like, ‘That’s great, well done.’ Deirdre was much more rigorous, she introduced me to the idea of rigour, and standards. The other people in the class were older than me, they had a different vocabulary. And I felt really intimidated. I remember then settling and feeling that it was a very positive thing. Paul Murray was in that workshop – he was a final year student at the time. To me, they were so glamorous and incredibly intellectual. But they were also very warm, and sweet towards me. Paul and I have remained good friends since then.
The character Catherine in Tender conducts interviews with several well-known authors, was that your experience as well?
I was the books editor for Trinity News, and I got to interview a lot of writers. I just wrote to them and said ‘Can I interview you?’ John McGahern was very kind. At that time he wasn’t giving many interviews, he came out of himself more in the last years of his life. I really admired him, he was a hero for me at that time in my life. I was very nervous and he was very kind; my questions were bumbling and really pretentious, I was asking him awful questions about Sartre. He saw exactly what this was, a nervous undergrad meeting him for interview for the college paper. He gave me lots of nice material to use. Well some, he was pretty reticent as well.
Michael Doonan [the fictional author Catherine interviews] isn’t based on anyone. Maybe he’s all Irish writers, or maybe he’s none. No male writer that I’ve ever interviewed as a young journalist was assholey to me. Here was an opportunity for me to push some of Catherine’s stuff to the surface. She’s very neurotic. I wanted a very controlled figure who would push her into these blurty kind of statements. Also I was interested in putting a very young female journalist with a very established older male writer and just seeing what happened.
The novel is set not long after homosexuality was legalised in Ireland, and charts the difficulty of one of the characters in coming out. This is very timely, following the recent Marriage Referendum.
The timing is entirely serendipitous. I’d been working on the book for five years, in fact the genesis of the book is much earlier. The two characters, Catherine and James, I’d been toying with those characters for the guts of 17 years. The timing has been weird in a way. The reason it came out this month is because I was late with it. It was supposed to come out last year, but I just didn’t submit it on time. That’s why it came out in May. Then it just turned out that it came out the week of the Referendum. I was like, ‘This is really, really weird.’ And I was actually very worried that this was entirely the wrong time for it, that people would go, ‘Oh we don’t want to read it. We never want to read another story about another young gay man again.’ But that was just me being jumpy and paranoid, it’s about the characters.
What else is fortuitous in the book is that Catherine experiences a lot of ‘mansplaining’. Have you heard of ‘mansplaining’?
Do you understand that you’ve just mansplained ‘mansplaining’ to me? She absolutely does. It’s cultural: it’s the time, the country, the fact that she’s a young woman who’s quite naïve, and doesn’t hide her naïveté. I don’t know what her progression is throughout the novel with regard to that question, but certainly at the beginning of the book she’s almost looking to be mansplained at. That’s the extent of her conditioning. One of the things that she loves about James is that she says she can feel her mind grow with him. Mansplaining is not something she sees as a bad thing, at the beginning of the book. Whereas I think that by the end she’s gotten her own territory a bit more. But I’m also not sure about that, it’s not a straightforward journey into clarity for Catherine.
The book also captures how boys tend to communicate with Catherine in this very ironic way.
I wondered if that was a generational thing. In the late ’90s, when I was in college, everything was so deeply ironic that we were almost paralysed by it. It was like the new Joycean paralysis was this intense irony where nothing was serious, and it probably has accelerated actually in recent years. That’s something I’m glad you saw, the way in which irony offers people this very pleasurable, very funny way to communicate – the way the character Emmet communicates with Catherine, for instance. He’s telling her he’s into her, but he’s not going to say it straight. There’s something really lovely about that, but it is also just another way in which we don’t talk to each other, that directness is not possible. But maybe that’s a good thing, maybe directness is actually an over-rated quality.
Another of the book’s themes is the importance of gossip in Irish society, seen in the character Pat Burke.
Oh yeah, he’s an old dick! He’s just the local busy-body. He’s the eyes of the community, and the self-appointed moral arbiter. It’s dangerous to talk about anything in representation, but he is an older Ireland, an Ireland that watches. There’s something of the church in him, the patriarchal society that tells you what you can and cannot do. The idea that these two young people couldn’t just sit together and do whatever they want together, without it being reported back, as if it’s his right to do that. That is the environment and atmosphere out of which Catherine has come. In that sense a lot of her paralysis is probably natural, or at least understandable.
The structure to Tender is unusual in that it changes from section to section.
There are four sections and each one is stylistically different, particularly the third section. The third section, ‘Romance’, is Catherine’s crisis – in fact, James’ crisis as well. By that stage the wide-eyed girl of the early part of the book has been left behind. The book is entirely set in her close, third-person perspective, it’s her consciousness. So I wanted the shape of the language to reflect her consciousness. At the beginning it’s gushing, naïve, over-done: that had to be the case, and was awfully difficult because my temptation was to prune it, make it look elegant and sophisticated. But that wouldn’t represent her consciousness. The challenge was the plot has to keep moving, quite a lot of the plot work has to be done in that section. Even though it’s broken and fragmented, she goes to a different place mentally, so it was challenging.
In a recent interview with the Irish Times, it appeared as if you wanted to distance yourself from claims that Tender was overly autobiographical.
I actually didn’t, in fact I was the one who brought it up, because it hadn’t come up and I didn’t want to be coy about it. [Tender] at its core is an autobiographic novel. As I said, I had been working on those characters for 17 years, those two young people grew out of my experience. But the irony of that is very little – only the tiniest, almost peripheral things – are from life, and the larger events are fictional. Yet I still think of it as deeply personal, as autobiographical, in a way that I find it hard to articulate. As in, I cannot say all this happened to me, and yet, it’s a deeply personal book. I’m not at all trying to distance myself from autobiography, I couldn’t be bothered.
There’s a line taken from Catherine’s English essay on Plath and Hughes, that I thought was an attempt to throw readers off the scent: ‘About autobiography, and how it never showed itself in the work in the lazy way that readers expected it to.’
I don’t know if it was an attempt to throw people off the scent, again that was Catherine’s essay, not my novel. It’s interesting that once you put autobiography into the ring at all, it shuts the conversation down slightly. I wrote that essay as an undergrad. It’s a very undergraduate thing to become fixated with. But also, Plath’s poetry is so viscerally in touch with a certain kind of pain, so I gave that essay to Catherine. She thinks she feels the connection of the intensity of emotion that’s in [Plath’s] poetry.
I resisted that aspect of the book a long time, I thought there’s something cringey about it. But then an awful lot of the work of writing this book was learning to realise that the cringe was the point. If your character is a green, naive, melodramatic seventeen-year-old, you don’t give her hipster cred. If your character is a little bit naïve or embarrassing, then you have to go there, even if it makes you look naïve or embarrassing. That’s your contract, as a writer. It’s very exposing.
Words: Eoin Tierney
Photo: Rich Gilligan
