Which to read of the several hundred new novels published each year is a very difficult question. It is narrowed down drastically to those one finds out about but it's still likely one will miss fine books.
Perhaps one can only go by the reviews one sees. Last year I was less than impressed after an enthusaistic recommendation for James Salter. But The Times featured a review of this, Niall Williams' eighth novel, recently and I'm glad to say the book lived up to its glowing report.
Ruth Swain is devoted to books and confined to bed by illness in rainswept West of Ireland near a river full of salmon. The book is a chronicle of her family history seen through the 3,958 books that belonged to her father, that surround her now. It is a story of marginalisation on the fringes, of falling short, of fish and water and of books. Already, by page 20, I had begun to wonder how soon I might tire of its cleverness and its literariness but in the end, I never did. It is beautifully clever, but impressively sustained in its constant cross referencing to Literature but also darkly comic in the voice of Ruth. It must always be a challenge for a fiction writer to create a brilliant character because they have to be brilliant enough to show us, but Niall Williams is apparently massively well-read and gifted enough to do just that. It is showy but not pyrotechnically so because it is downbeat, rain-lashed and in some ways about impoverishment. Dickens is a big favourite of Ruth's. The writing of the novel is a theme of the novel, too, but that doesn't get in its way.
When Ruth first wears glasses,
there were others who couldn't see well, others you saw squinting or looking into the copy next to them when there was something to be taken down from the board, but either they wouldn't allow their beauty compromised by the thick, brown-rimmed glasses the Mid -Western Health Board had decided was the best anti-boy device they could think of, or their parents didn't think seeing was so important for girls.
The prose flows like the river that runs through the book. Of the birth of her brother, Aeney, Ruth says,
He swam down the River Mam ahead of me and when he landed he landed in the amazed wet eyes of my father.
And, one night, trying to block out the noise in the river in spate, 'even J.S. Bach had to pause sometime' between movements,
and in the end I stood in my nightie and opened the skylight and screamed at it, which is neither great for your reputation or stopping river noise.
The writing is massively resourceful, densely-packed with evocative or well-judged perceptions, like the cat who spends all day on the hen house roof 'watching the Hens Channel', or how there will be a last time that you see any given person, how one wants to cling on to them but,
right before your eyes they are becoming that bit more ghost.
But the narrative, in its flashbacks, eventually arrives at Ruth's father, Virgil, who is a poet. Not only is this an unheard of, awe-inspiring thing in the outpost of Faha, but the typescript of his book, The History of the Rain, is posted to London to a publisher, unimaginably far away. From there, in a moving last few chapters, the novel moves into a sort of coda, a redemption of underwhelming lives through literature that even includes some redemption for Ruth's underwhelming suitor, Vincent Cunningham.
It is a hugely impressive book that one can readily admire and only fall short of loving if it sometimes seems just a bit too smart and knowing. And that's not the end of the world.
