"Molly Fox's Birthday" by Deirdre Madden

[Debbie Moorhouse]

Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
I think unfortunately I was in the wrong reading mode for this book. I've been set on SFF for too long and nobody switched me to litfic.
In SFF--nay, in commercial fiction generally--you're told:

NEVER begin with a dream sequence
NEVER begin with someone waking up
NEVER have someone describe themselves in a mirror.

"Molly Fox's Birthday" shamelessly breaches rules one and two. The playwright protagonist (who either isn't named or whose name is entirely unmemorable) wakes from a dream and then potters through the rest of her day thinking about her close friends, the eponymous Molly Fox, an attractive vivacious actor, and Andrew Forde, an art historian with a disturbed background and gravitas. It's Molly Fox's birthday, but she's in New York and she doesn't celebrate her birthday anyway.

The narrative goes on to explore the relationships between these three people, and a few others who wander in and out, while examining the nature of bereavement, acting, writing, and other significant topics. Most of this is done in a series of flashbacks, although occasionally characters in the story--who all seem incapable of remembering that Molly's in New York--wander on set for a while.

At first I was waiting somewhat impatiently for the backstory to end and the story to begin; nearly 30 pages in, I realised the backstory WAS the story. A disappointment, certainly--I like scenes, and this novel is 90% gloss. There's an interesting story to be told, but I think for me it would have been more interesting if the novel had started with the narrator's first meeting with Molly, or with the start of her friendship with Andrew, and told the story as it happened, rather than through ruminations and flashbacks.

There are other problems, as well. The dialogue all seems the same regardless of who's speaking, and much of it reads like extracts from articles rather than how people would naturally speak. A bit off-putting really. The narrator has an unfortunate tendency towards repetitiveness. But the worst issue, for me, was that insights that might seem touching and fresh were they come across by the characters in the course of an active narrative seem banal and obvious when presented as the culmination of hours of reflection.

The forty-odd-year old Andrew opines, "One thing the making of this series convinced me about--that memorials of any kind have more to do with the living than the dead."

If we'd seen him going through the process that brought him to that conclusion, if we'd really understood, rather than just being told, in the course of conversation, that his brother's murder had closed him off to this kind of analysis, maybe it wouldn't come across as quite so disturbingly trite.

I am I suppose too set in my opinions as to what makes for an engaging narrative. I like scenes, I like to be shown rather than told, I like elliptical and naturalistic dialogue. Too picky, that's me. Which leaves me thinking that there was a fascinating story here to be told, especially with the glimpses of genuine emotional insights on the part of the narrator that sometimes appear through the gloss. But this isn't the way I would have chosen to tell it.


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