STRAYING
By Molly McCloskey
215 pp. Scribner. $24.
How do you write an adultery tale today? How, coming from the land of prenups and no-fault divorce, can a novelist impart new bite to the subject of a married person’s illicit love affair? True, the stakes have been declining since the age of Homer, when Helen’s flight with Paris resulted in a 10-year war, the fall of a city-state and, on the upside, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” But even in the 19th-century novel, adulterers tended to pay with their lives: Emma Bovary swallowing poison; Hurstwood, in “Sister Carrie,” turning on the gas. Nowadays, although sex seems once again to be walled in by a new arsenal of prohibitions, it’s only the nonconsensual variety that will cause a protagonist’s downfall.
Molly McCloskey, an American writer who has spent much of her adult life in Ireland, brings a hyper-lucid wistfulness to the genre. Her novel’s title may sound jokey, but her book is dead serious about the losses entailed in a marriage’s undermining.
“Straying” — McCloskey’s first book to be published in the United States — takes place in the town of Sligo in the west of Ireland. Alice, its young American narrator, arrives there “at the tail end of the 1980s,” back when the country was poor, inward-looking, hidebound, “a place celebrating, insistently, its own collapse.” To readers familiar with recent Irish history, this will seem a last moment of bitter innocence, before the ’90s boom of property speculation and tech start-ups. Already, though, Alice spots the newly wealthy “who dined at Dublin’s only Michelin-starred restaurant and had a home-alarm system that knew exactly where they were and would buzz their beepers if there was trouble,” people who are “all spit and polish, proud to be Irish, and with a vague air of plunder. … It was like witnessing the advent of an alien species.” To her Irish hosts, Alice appears equally alien, a visitor from the El Dorado that for generations has swallowed up their young. This mutual appraisal between the foreigner and the Irish — not to mention between the various echelons of Ireland’s implacable class system — will prove one of the many pleasures of this humane and lucid novel.
Alice is working in a pub when she meets her future husband; he’d been told “there was a Yank behind the bar and he should have a look.” Eddie, a successful importer-exporter of furniture, belongs to a prosperous local family. His mother isn’t very welcoming to Alice, a woman who “came from nowhere in particular” and “had never been in a house where there was ‘help.’” And Eddie, rock-solid but taciturn, isn’t much use in providing clues to the “teeming, tricky, intricately coded world” in which his fiancée has found herself.
They marry, despite Alice’s misgivings. They buy a house overlooking the Atlantic, but Alice is at loose ends. Every morning her husband goes off to work, and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. She drinks too much — everybody does in McCloskey’s novel — she and Eddie wrangle about her aimless afternoons, about the way she has fallen back in with the unemployed musicians she hung out with pre-marriage, pre-respectability. This is a place where everything is seen, reported, judged, which is one reason Ireland is such a good setting for an adultery novel. When Alice tells a new acquaintance that she’s married, it’s as if Meghan Markle were explaining to an attendant at Kensington Palace that she’s the American actress who’s engaged to Prince Harry: “There are few things on earth smaller than this country.”
One day Alice meets Cauley, a young playwright who is both ambitious and puppy-soft. Almost immediately, she knows she’s going to sleep with him; she just doesn’t know what it will mean: “I had imagined that it would bring me to my senses, remind me that I was a grown-up now, with a cupboard full of wedding china and candlesticks that matched.” Instead, it turns her into someone “feral, like an addict, all stealth and unreason.”
Yet the love affair whose rhythms she describes — sitting on her front steps, savoring the arrival of a letter from Cauley; engaging in furtive sex on a bus — recalls nothing so much as a teenage passion. No wonder, when Alice’s husband confronts her, it’s “as though it were all simply beneath him, Cauley and I nothing more than naughty children who had embarrassed him in front of the other grown-ups.”
Toward the end of the affair, there’s an emblematic encounter. The circumstances are seedy: Cauley is scrounging money from his mother, a disreputable figure because she’s living with the lover for whom she broke up her marriage. (Ireland only legalized divorce in 1996.) They meet in a suburban pub, Alice and Cauley painfully hung over, the mother and her boyfriend “deeply and committedly alcoholic. … It wasn’t only the drink, though, that dishonored them, it was the legal limbo of the undivorced. They had about them a fugitive air, and an uncertainty about how much their transgressions mattered.” When Alice and Cauley make their escape, Cauley says, “Well, there’s us in 30 years!” and they laugh “as though the voicing of it had rendered it impossible.”
It is impossible — both because Ireland is changing so fast and because there’s a wild card in McCloskey’s pack, a third mother inhabiting this novel, whose example is far more nourishing than that of either Eddie’s mother or Cauley’s.
Alice, of course, doesn’t come from “nowhere.” Her own mother is a woman “in some respects ahead of her time,” an administrator in a university philosophy department in Oregon who, when she became pregnant after a brief romance with a visiting professor, chose to raise the child on her own. This woman is instantly familiar: a mixture of the naïvely wonder-struck and the old-lady ordinary (happy evenings watching “Jeopardy” in her retirement condo; a compulsion to keep her new cellphone charged, accompanied by fear of actually using it). But although Alice feels perhaps excessively adored by her mother, she’s never been able to compensate for her lack of a father. “Straying,” it turns out, means straying not just from one’s partner but from a parent who, for all her delight in the world’s possibilities, couldn’t give her child the stability she craved. It’s only after Alice’s own marriage has ended that Alice finds herself “falling in love” with her mother “over and over again,” that she’s able — at a distance — to learn from this surprising woman’s blend of practicality and joy.
In “Conversations With Friends,” the Irish writer Sally Rooney’s first novel, her young heroine tells a friend’s husband, “We can sleep together if you like, but you should know I’m only doing it ironically.”
Alice, we may come to feel, has been approaching both her marriage and her affair semi-ironically, playing at being the stay-at-home wife with matching candlesticks, playing at being the adulteress addicted to secrecy and ruin. The real heartbreak in this wise, discomfiting novel turns out to be the love between mother and daughter — a daughter early damage has driven to exile in a hard place.