I can\u2019t remember when in the 1990s I read Janice Galloway\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ca very funny and sad novel\u201d. The novelist Susan Hill declared: \u201cJanice Galloway is not a promising young writer \u2014 she has fully arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Trainspotting (1993), Kelman\u2019s Booker prize win for How Late It Was, How Late (1994), Alan Warner\u2019s Morvern Callar (1995) and Ali Smith\u2019s Free Love stories (1995). <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cwell outside the town it claims to be part of\u201d, an \u201coverspill from Glasgow\u201d. Sleep eludes her and she evades meals. She is often wasted, but also wasting away.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s stream-of-consciousness comes in taut sentences that spark with kinetic energy.<\/p>\n
\u2022 What we\u2019re reading this week \u2014 by the Times books team<\/a><\/p>\n 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. \u201cI\u2019d never have figured. I thought you had more fight than that,\u201d says a male colleague visiting Joy in hospital, whose unaddressed anorexia feels an effort at erasure. \u201cI think about it after he\u2019s away. Maybe there\u2019s less to me than a lot of people think.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s depiction of Kafkaesque NHS bureaucracy in the scenes where Joy repeatedly explains her situation to one medic, then another, although a referral exists.<\/p>\n The New York Times once described the novel as \u201cresembling Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath\u201d. On a bookshelf bringing together debut novels depicting breakdowns, Galloway\u2019s 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\u2019s The Comforters. Galloway is a Spark fan.<\/p>\n