Surgery has left a scar, and the growth has affected the boy’s vision, speech, and gait. Through a child’s clues and fumbling approximations, we gather that the girl’s brother has had a brain tumor, which appears to be in remission. The novel’s narrator addresses her elder brother in the second-person singular.
Here illness is both in the family and of it. When McBride’s prose is most difficult, it is because it is doubly difficult: hard to follow and hard to bear. The perverted uncle and the pious mother may be conventional enough McBride’s relentless examination of a teen-age girl’s psychic and moral collapse is anything but.
(“The biddies are having their sup.”) And not a few contemporary writers have bent language, as McBride does, away from formal sense-making and toward private orality: Ali Smith, in “Hotel World” Peter Carey, in “True History of the Kelly Gang” Patrick McCabe, in “The Butcher Boy.” What is most original about McBride’s novel is not the style but the use that is made of that style. Apart from the obvious Joycean influence, there is the example of Faulkner, and of Beckett. But to call it a new “style from scratch,” as one did, may be excessive. British reviews have emphasized the novelty of McBride’s style. Backdated compensation arrived earlier this year, in the form of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize for Fiction). She wrote this novel fast, in six months, at the age of twenty-seven, and spent the next nine years trying to get it published. “Everything I have written before is rubbish, and today is the beginning of something else,” she concluded.
McBride has spoken of the moment, when she was in her mid-twenties, that she first encountered “Ulysses.” She told the Guardian that it was decisive. The girl’s voice is frequently crossed by the voices of adults, as in this description of going to church (the narrator is now five):
So McBride’s prose starts by mimicking the visceral, fractured comprehension of a child taking clumsy possession of an adult world. The novel is narrated by the “half-formed” girl of the title, and begins when she is two years old. (A reference to Walkmans suggests the nineteen-eighties.) Most strikingly, McBride’s novel is written in a dense, interrupted, shattered language, blooming with neologisms, compounds, stretched senses, old words put to new uses. For one thing, all the characters are unnamed, and they inhabit an Ireland shorn of dates and obvious historical specificity. “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing” is indeed conventional in places, but in most respects the novel is blazingly daring. Irish fiction and drama have prospered on their ration of curses, drink, and church: family history of this kind would seem to be the nightmare from which we are happy enough not to be awakened. Eimear McBride’s first novel, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing” (Coffee House), tells a fall-and-fall story that, especially in a traditional Irish setting, can seem familiar fictional material: a departed father, a pious, abusive mother, an errant and blasphemous daughter, a predatory uncle, a death in the family, a God-soaked household busy with meddling priests and vain prayer.
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