About to Fall Apart <\/p>\n
Author: Ashley Hickson-Lovence<\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 978-0-571-39268-1<\/p>\n
Publisher: Faber & Faber<\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u00a312.99, 158pp<\/p>\n
Abandoned as an infant by his Irish mother and black father, 70-year-old Aidy, an aspiring writer, is trying to finish a short story by Sunday in his bachelor cottage. <\/p>\n
An ageing man, one weekend \u2013 at just over 150 pages, About to Fall Apart begs to be read in one sitting. But the book is also distinguished by its singular style of phrases punctuated with forward slashes: \u201cAidy didn\u2019t want to punch him\/ he really didn\u2019t\/ but that guy had it coming\u201d. <\/p>\n
Ashley Hickson-Lovence\u2019s previous work has experimented with second-person and free verse, and while his approach may daunt certain readers, his new novel delivers a pure way into one person\u2019s mind that is ultimately devoid of affect.<\/p>\n
On one level the novel functions as a hilarious meditation on writing, especially the procrastinating part. Aidy snacks on crisps (\u201clets them fizz on his tongue like communion wafers\u201d), surfs the internet, and, like every other author, fantasises about a celebrity future \u201cin a swanky study with a shelf of all his books behind him\/\u2026 drinking fancy South African white wine & reading Zadie Smith novels\u201d. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s also a portrait of an imperfect man with a hair-trigger temper and more than a touch of a womanising rogue. Married three times, Aidy is now texting a \u201cbusty blonde twenty-something\u201d from Ukraine who \u201cdoes something to stop some of the sadness that gets harder & harder to handle\u201d. His loneliness is painfully relatable in its self-pity. <\/p>\n
Parents and children, blended and broken, are at the book\u2019s heart. Like Aidy\u2019s mother, Hickson-Lovence\u2019s Irish grandmother gave up her biracial son \u2013 the author\u2019s uncle \u2013 in 1950s Ireland, but although Aidy longs for the birth parent he never knew, he himself has three children whom he barely raised. Faced with his 15-year-old daughter, Eimear, Aidy \u201chas to stop himself ruffling the top of her scalp like she\u2019s a Labrador\u201d. <\/p>\n
Hickson-Lovence\u2019s title may echo Chinua Achebe\u2019s novel Things Fall Apart, which also used a linguistically experimental style to address black families in a colonised world; however, although race remains a factor in the story, it\u2019s the anxious, awkward nuances of family feeling that matter most. <\/p>\n
Despite their father\u2019s relative absence, Aidy\u2019s children are intelligent and well-adjusted. When they take him to the pub, we\u2019re practically ecstatic, for Aidy\u2019s sake, that they love him. Hickson-Lovence, who is in his thirties, has not only dared to inhabit a man twice his age, he has also invited us to do so. So when we emerge from the novel slightly hungover and somewhat hopeful, we realise that the most mind-blowing aspect about this journey is that we have undertaken it ourselves. <\/p>\n
Mei Chin is a writer from New York City living in Dublin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About to Fall Apart Author: Ashley Hickson-Lovence ISBN-13: 978-0-571-39268-1 Publisher: Faber & Faber Guideline Price: \u00a312.99, 158pp Abandoned…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6489,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-608145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-book-reviews","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}