I can’t remember when in the 1990s I read Janice Galloway’s searing debut novel, The Trick Is to Keep Breathing, about a young, bereaved woman falling apart. What I can recall vividly is the intensity of that reading experience: the pull of the sad, strange yet mordantly funny first-person narration, the discombobulating sense that you might look up from the page to see murky waters rising, walls folding in.
In Scotland the cleverly titled novel is deemed a contemporary classic (it has been a set text on the Scottish Highers syllabus). Elsewhere I feel it deserves to be better known, although when it was published by the Edinburgh independent Polygon in 1989 it was to acclaim. In The Sunday Times Penelope Fitzgerald judged it “a very funny and sad novel”. The novelist Susan Hill declared: “Janice Galloway is not a promising young writer — she has fully arrived.”
And Galloway did so at a time when the inventiveness of writers like Alasdair Gray, Iain Banks and James Kelman were drawing attention to a vigorous Scottish literary scene increasingly confident in its own vernacular. Her breakthrough came after those authors, but before Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), Kelman’s Booker prize win for How Late It Was, How Late (1994), Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and Ali Smith’s Free Love stories (1995).
From the off we know all is not well for its narrator, a drama teacher whom we discover bears the misnomer of Joy. Within pages we learn that her lover drowned on holiday in Spain while she was sunbathing nearby. It transpires he was her older colleague, still married to another woman.
The 27-year-old Joy has also recently lost her mother, while her best friend, Marianne, has left to work in the US. Evenings and weekends are spent rattling drunkenly round her empty home on an Ayrshire sink housing scheme “well outside the town it claims to be part of”, an “overspill from Glasgow”. Sleep eludes her and she evades meals. She is often wasted, but also wasting away.
This makes the novel sound like a misery-fest, but what makes The Trick Is to Keep Breathing an entertaining white-knuckle ride is the reader’s sincere hope that the clever, sympathetic Joy, a bone-dry wit and caustic observer of her sorry situation, will pull back from the brink. Also, the verve of Galloway’s writing, which confidently embraces experimentalism (words occasionally slip off the margins, fonts are played with, dialogue reproduced) without it feeling forbidding or just for show. Joy’s stream-of-consciousness comes in taut sentences that spark with kinetic energy.
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Some of the miseries heaped on Joy might feel a tad excessive. Nevertheless, characters and situations are keenly, humanely portrayed. There is beauty in the bleakness. “I’d never have figured. I thought you had more fight than that,” says a male colleague visiting Joy in hospital, whose unaddressed anorexia feels an effort at erasure. “I think about it after he’s away. Maybe there’s less to me than a lot of people think.”
The novel was published 36 years ago. Some of its predatory males are, one hopes, more of that era. But wearily familiar to anyone who has ever fought to get someone admitted to hospital will be Galloway’s depiction of Kafkaesque NHS bureaucracy in the scenes where Joy repeatedly explains her situation to one medic, then another, although a referral exists.
The New York Times once described the novel as “resembling Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath”. On a bookshelf bringing together debut novels depicting breakdowns, Galloway’s defeated Joy Stone deserves her place alongside the pert Esther Greenwood of The Bell Jar, the misfit Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye and the paranoid, raving Catholic Caroline Rose in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters. Galloway is a Spark fan.
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Some novelistic worlds you could stay in for ever. Here, the convincingly drawn slough of despond is a setting that you long to see a vital heroine freed from. This is a sad novel, but not a depressing one. Trauma has pushed Joy out of kilter, but she does not rule out righting herself. “I’m gawky, not a natural swimmer. But I can read up a little, take advice. I read somewhere the trick is to keep breathing, make out it’s not unnatural at all. They say it comes with practice.” There is hope.
The Trick is to Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway (Vintage £9.99 pp240). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members