Close to Home
By Michael Magee
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2023

Michael Magee’s genuinely startling debut novel Close to Home tells the story of a young man named Sean living in a contemporary Belfast as sere and hopeless as the dark side of the moon. He bounces aimlessly between his drifting crowd of clueless drunken friends, his damaged but charismatic older brother Anthony, and his flailing, pathetic mother, but the book is thickly populated with crowds of silent, resentful ghosts. This is a Belfast full of very living old resentments, a place where, as Sean thinks at one point about a random cab driver, any man you meet might have blood on his hands. “She was only seven when the curfew started,” Sean reflects while living in a tiny house with his mother. “She remembers helicopters hovering over the road, the sound of gunshots in the night. Having to sleep on the floor in case stray bullets came through the window.”

Sean’s own life has no such ideological moorings, indeed no moorings of any kind. He has the first glimmers of literary ability, one short story he works up the courage to submit to a publication, but he mostly spends his days looking for work, being bored or disappointed by work, and getting fired from work – and his nights “on the rip” with the old friends he’s mostly outgrown. Drugs and alcohol suffuse the narrative, and Magee creates vivid moments showing the pointless toil of the pattern:

I dragged my blanket into the living room and let the TV laugh for me. Then I rang the Chinese at the top of the road and ordered a chicken curry with no peas or onions, half chips, half fried rice, a portion of prawn crackers and a tin of Coke. I ate what I could, but my stomach was in bits. I had diarrhoea, and then the shakes got worse. I curled up under the blanket and shivered. My heart was going like mad, the sweat was lashing off me, and I kept getting shooting pains in my arms and legs. That’s when I started to panic. The room was like a hole in the ground that I had fallen down into. There was no rope, no ladder, and no matter how much I tried to dig my hands into the mud, the earth wouldn’t hold my weight. I fell back down into the darkness. When I woke up, I was overcome with emotion. I sat up on the settee and took a deep breath through my nose and out my mouth.

(Immediately after this ordeal, Sean’s current boss calls to fire him)

Magee cannily inserts quick refrains of beauty into this morass. “In the afternoon, the sky darkened,” goes one such passage. “Clouds swallowed up shadows cast by headstones across the grass.” But this doesn’t do much to brighten the gloom surrounding both Sean’s seemingly doomed struggle to make something of his life and his intermittent quest to learn the exact details of his father’s murder. So many of his own decisions are so heartbreakingly feckless or stupid that all avenues to a brighter life seem to be choking off one by one as the narrative progresses – and Magee’s underspoken genius is to make the reader care about it all, this one average life amidst a throng of such lives. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.