"Straying," by Molly McCloskey

The last few years I seem to have read more fiction by Irish writers than usual; something has drawn me to it. Part of this is my affinity for Colm Toibin’s and Anne Enright’s fiction (not to mention my longtime admiration for the late William Trevor’s work), but there have been other works I have enjoyed as well. The novel I just read, “Straying” (Scribner, 2017), by Molly McCloskey (who is Irish but now lives in Washington, DC), is beautifully blurbed by the above-mentioned Anne Enright: “As gripping as a memoir and as intimate as a poem…a novel that is both urgent and reflective, a tender and unsentimental exploration of love’s dark corners.” Yes. Indeed. “Exploration” is a good word for what happens in this novel. “Straying,” set almost entirely in Ireland, mostly in a small town outside of Dublin, with trips into Dublin, features as the main character a young American woman named Alice who moves to Ireland almost on a whim, and soon finds herself embedded in life there. She travels, works, learns, and meets the man she will marry: Eddie. They are happy, but – as the title of the novel indicates – Alice “strays,” as in falling into an affair with another Irish man, Cauley. Her own feelings are complicated, as are those of both men involved. In some senses, of course, this story of a love triangle is a classic story, a well worn one. Yet McCloskey brings a freshness to it. Alice is a complex yet very relatable character. She does a lot of pondering about her situation and about love, connection, family, and more. At some point in the novel, the story jumps about 30 years into the future, where we find that Alice has long been an aid worker, working all over the world in countries in various types of crisis, and she is well respected for her work. She is now back in Ireland. She sometimes muses about her youthful time in Ireland, and about her mother, and about all she has seen and learned since then. The plot sounds low key, and on some level it is; even what seem like the “dramatic” aspects of the story are not overly dramatized. This is a thoughtful novel about thoughtful characters, albeit ones who make some mistakes (but who doesn’t?).