Ordinary Human Failings

In Megan Nolan’s new novel, a quietly dysfunctional Irish family living in England gets a rude awakening when its youngest member, a little girl named Lucy, is accused of a violent crime. Now Carmel—Lucy's mother—sits anxiously in a hotel, brooding and awaiting the findings of the investigation into what Lucy did. With her is a reporter, thrilled to have a scoop, a narrative he cannot so much shape, as warp. Ordinary Human Failings is already being compared to Shuggie Bain, but the clue to their essential difference is in that word: ordinary. While Douglas Stuart’s novel was steeped in the psychology of extraordinary, grinding poverty, Nolan’s novel is piercingly insightful on the psychology of everyday disappointment. Her knack is for evoking so much, so economically. She doesn’t paint a broad canvas of neglect, silence, and secrets, she simply builds a trail of tiny, devastatingly evocative brush strokes in this keenly observed and riveting novel.