This is O’Brien’s 20th work of fiction, and it’s interesting how this book recasts the parameters of her early work. Published 40 years ago now, those first few novels were swift, frothy, yet extraordinarily tactile tales about girls and women who felt the pull of rural life. Six of them were banned in O’Brien’s home county, where she grew up on a farm in a village of 200.
In The Light of Evening, the dynamic between home and away borne out in these books becomes a leitmotif for the perils of motherhood. Dilly clasps Eleanor close, just as her own mother did when she left for Brooklyn long ago. "Dear Dilly," begins one such letter, "A reign of terror has started up." A few paragraphs later it ends: "All this and you not here to help us."
A great deal of The Light of Evening is told through these letters, which O’Brien has admitted in interviews were inspired by ones she received from her own mother. It is some powerful sorcery for her weave them into the fabric of fiction here. Never do they feel false or forced, nor do they bully the action along. The plot itself is dramatic enough. Dilly’s brother is killed in violence, and she moves home, marrying soon thereafter a well-to-do man. By her early ‘20s, her farflung living is over.
For Dilly’s daughter, however, marriage is just the first stepping stone in her push away from Ireland. She elopes and moves to Dublin and later to London with an older, émigré writer. Her affection feels too good to be true, so he spoils it by asking for more. "Eleanor’s husband Hermann would always contend that she had married him under the guise of love to better her ambitions," O’Brien writes with her typical brutal acuity.
During this period of her life, Eleanor becomes closer with her mother. But just as the bond of marriage becomes something they can share, Eleanor smashes that, too. Her marriage falls apart and she sets off on a series of affairs with married men. She gets more grief about this from her mother than her ex-husband: "You chose your own marriage and we made the best of it," Dilly writes to her, "so do not go on blaming us for your misfortune, as I believe you secretly do." Now there’s a statement a therapist could spend a year unpacking.
It gradually becomes apparent that there is reason for this hostility beyond simple mother-daughter fireworks. O’Brien secrets this information like a masterful storyteller, creating a multi-tiered structure of a novel, full of elisions and multiple points of view that dramatize the breakdown of communication. She understands the honeycomb of family life like few writers at work today.
She also knows how to write a beautiful sentence. Rather than drape her gems around one character, O’Brien parcels them out equitably, giving some to Dilly, some to her daughter. Upon her wedding day, Dilly recalls "I exchanged our first married kiss in the view of the Liffey water, which was pewterish, with chunks of ice, some ungainly, others minute, rinsed and rerinsed, scattering bursts of diamond light."
Like William Faulkner, O’Brien is willing to try too much, write beyond what is necessary or what her abilities can sustain. A section of this book comes in diary format, and it screeches out of this novel with all the subtlety of a scream. It doesn’t fit with the form of the book. This is, after all, an episodic tale which won’t sit still: It needs as much stylistic continuity as it can get.
But all this jumping around accomplishes something. Halfway through the book a reader is apt to start yearning for Dilly and Eleanora to simply be in the same place—so they can catch up, make up. Maybe even talk as adults. We all know it doesn’t always work that way, however. Schedules collide, letters go unanswered. And as O’Brien bravely admits in this dark and powerful tale, more often than not this isn’t an accident.