A distinctive Irish novelist returns with ‘The City Changes Its Face’
Eily, the Irish protagonist of Eimear McBride’s novel “The Lesser Bohemians” (2016), moves to London at 18 to attend drama school. A few weeks into her first semester, she meets Stephen, a freelance theater actor 20 years older, who seems to have not a care in the world. The first time they meet, inside a pub, he is reading Dostoevsky alone on a Saturday night. The attraction between them is immediate, but they spend much of the novel — and the entirety of Eily’s freshman year — figuring out the terra incognita between a situationship and a relationship. Stephen has a daughter, Grace, a couple of years younger than Eily, but he has been estranged from her for more than a decade. He finds a willing listener in Eily and tells her about his years as a lackluster father in his early 20s, back when he was battling a self-destructive drug habit and the demons of an abusive childhood.
Early in “The City Changes Its Face,” McBride’s messier follow-up to “The Lesser Bohemians,” we learn that Eily and Stephen have been living together in an apartment for more than a year. Stephen has reconnected with his daughter and finished writing and directing an autobiographical film, based on his traumatic 20s. Eily, who is supposed to be in her third year of drama school, is skipping all her classes. Why?
McBride switches between two timelines: a harrowing argument between the couple stretching over one winter night, juxtaposed with flashbacks from their past 18 months living together, especially during one visit from Grace the previous winter. One moment, Eily is watching Stephen fix himself a sandwich at midnight, if only to avoid talking about an ongoing rift in their relationship; the next, she is getting drunk with Grace in a muggy bar (“a meat market”) and exchanging notes about Stephen. Grace’s reappearance in her father’s life casts interesting shadows over his love life. Eily spends much of the novel agonizing about their dry spell in the bedroom: “So there we both were, staring at the wall.”
Ever since her 2013 debut, “A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing,” McBride’s novels have been exercises in ruptured language. Her protagonists’ traumatized minds find their truest expression in truncated sentences and scruffy syntax. In “The Lesser Bohemians,” Eily imagined London as a dreamy destiny of sorts: “I will make myself of life here for life is this place and would be start of mine.” In the new novel, the city is a grittier presence, a sturdy backdrop to “our troublesome life.” Eily doesn’t hold back her anger each time Stephen politely sidesteps her overtures in bed. The moments when Eily argues with herself are rendered in a tinier font, as if to drive home their self-negation.
Halfway through, the novel is hijacked by a movie. Stephen’s backstory, recounted as a sprawling monologue in “The Lesser Bohemians,” is again laid out here, this time as a 75-page screenplay of his film. We’re treated to frame-by-frame summaries of the rough cut that Eily and Grace see in a preview screening, interspersed with Stephen’s frequent questions about the pacing and mood of certain scenes. I will never forget this account of the drug-addled hero’s face at one point: “Losing the cheek in his eyes until all his vaunt’s gone.” And yet, for all the technical finesse and painstaking attention to detail, I did wonder if subjecting readers to a weird movie script is McBride’s comment (or revenge) on the dullness of much other contemporary literary fiction. Dialogue has never been McBride’s strong suit, which makes the choice of a screenplay as a form even more jarring. Her characters get through their days speaking banalities like “Nothing, really” and “How’ve you been?”
“The City Changes Its Face” succeeds as a portrait of a couple transitioning from a phase of uncomplicated romance to something darker and more profound. But McBride’s formal innovations provide cover for a thinness of imagination this time around. Why does Eily not mind that Stephen didn’t think of casting her as an actor in a movie about his life? How can Grace warm up so instantly to her father’s 20-year-old girlfriend? Midway through a potentially triggering scene in the movie, Stephen pauses the screening to see if Grace and Eily are doing all right. The two women assure him that they are fine. “OK, but if that changes, shout,” Stephen replies. I fear that some of McBride’s fans might, on this occasion, shout.