Women’s Prize for Fiction: 3/16
Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings is going to be a bit challenging for me to talk about because while I can admire the skill behind it and see how others (particularly the Paul Murray Bee Sting crowd I think) will love it, it’s just not my type.
The story starts on a note of promising suspense with a young mother still longing for the affair that produced her child, while remaining uninterested in the child herself. The girl, age 10, is accused of a heinous crime, the entire family implicated behind the scenes. Running parallel to this disaster, we also follow a slimy try-hard reporter looking to take advantage of the situation for his own profit, at the family’s expense. It’s a shocking and effective set-up.
But from here, the story goes several directions that failed to hold my interest.
First, this is in its own way a motherhood story, offering a few perspectives that I think are important, especially regarding women’s health care issues. However, it isn’t a topic that I’m currently drawn to in my reading, so I struggled.
In addition, this book is a rippling family saga, in which the history of every person in the household is recounted in retrospect, the lives slotting together seamlessly and ruinously. Again, I can see a lot of readers appreciating this part of the narrative more than I did; it’s engaging and insightful enough, though I found the characters’ backgrounds entirely unsurprising, and knowing where the characters end up by the time these histories are recalled renders them a bit tedious.
There’s also the matter of the underlying theme of “ordinary human failings,” which I interpreted to be the personal challenges many of us face in our lives, the momentous but largely ignored obstacles that society seems to expect us to just get on with- like missing parental figures, alcoholism, teen pregnancy, lost love. Points of pain that could be handled with support, or prove disastrous if left unaddressed. I wanted the book to push harder at the term “ordinary,” not only to suggest that it’s human for us to struggle with things beyond our control, but to really advocate for the importance of removing societal shames and general lack of aid/understanding that stand in the way of people getting needed life-altering help. I think Nolan is on to something here and portrays it beautifully, but I’m a fan of a sharper critique, personally.
“Really, who would care about a family like theirs? Theirs were ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note.”
My reaction: 3 out of 5 stars. I’m sure Ordinary Human Failings will find a rapt audience and I don’t begrudge reading it; I’ve even added Nolan’s previous novel to my TBR as I did like her writing and suspect another plot may be more my style. I think this one will work better for others and don’t want to discourage anyone drawn to the synopsis, but I just didn’t like it as much as I’d hoped to.
Have you read this one, or does it catch your interest? Let me know in the comments!
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