Milkman

From the first page I was filled with rage and fear and contempt. Then about halfway through things started shifting, there were some unexpected turns, I was still afraid but the rage was less and the contempt was near gone. By the last page I was addicted, swooning, riding that what-an-awesome-book high.

Read this in an effort to expand my horizons to include more lit fic. I was blown away by the amount of levels this book functions on. The lack of proper nouns is a great tool for highlighting the gray space the narrator occupies in her relationships and in her homeland. The setting of 1970s Northern Ireland is interesting enough without using it to explore the pressures of conformity, especially those placed on women. The surreal, dreamy-journalistic quality to the writing adds to the intentional vagueness that permeates the whole novel. It's a challenging read, one that definitely made me feel like I was working to understand, but like a good workout, I feel really good having completed it.

This book was difficult to read because of the style in which it was written. Only two people in the large cast of characters are given anything resembling proper names: Milkman, a paramilitary man who is stalking the narrator (who is referred to as middle sister), and Somebody McSomebody, a borderline stalker. Everyone else is referred to by their relationship to middle sister or their place in the community. So you have characters like third brother in law, the man who doesn't love anybody (also known as real milkman, because he is in fact a milkman, unlike Milkman of the book's title), and the issues women, a group of feminists. Places are also named in this style at least part of the time, and certain activities like reading while walking, which middle sister does so that she doesn't have to be mentally present for the stress of living in her repressive society.

Although the city and the country are not named, it's clear that the story is set in 1970's Northern Ireland in the midst of the Troubles. The political situation dominates life to the extent that people's imaginations are stunted—anything the least bit out of the ordinary is either denied or looked on with suspicion. The paramilitary “renouncers” run middle sister's part of the city and hold kangaroo courts to punish anyone who deviates from the approved way of conducting their life. Middle sister's ways of coping with this include reading while walking (19th century or older literature only), running by herself or with third brother in law, and an ambivalent relationship with maybe boyfriend. When Milkman appears on the scene, obviously interested in her, her coping strategies are not adequate protection.

The style made it hard to get wrapped up in this book, but I eventually got comfortable and began to enjoy it. One of the things I admired was how beautifully the discomfort of being the object of unwanted attention was evoked. Middle sister feels she can't complain about or object to Milkman's attentions because nothing physical has happened and therefore she would be accused of complaining about nothing. But she's in a double bind, because even though nothing physical has happened, townspeople have noticed the meeting between Milkman and middle sister and blown it up into a rumor and then full fledged gossip that they are having an affair.

I also realized about halfway through the novel that the odd writing style had the effect for me of making this society seem more removed from familiar cultures than it would have if it had been explicitly set in Northern Ireland and people had proper names and were described in every day language. I read this as a dystopian novel for much of the time because of that, which I think is interesting.

Overall, I liked this book a lot, but found the style to be a significant barrier for at least half of it until I settled in.