Academy Street is an affecting and evocative story of one woman’s life spanning six decades, from rural Ireland of the 1940’s to New York in a new millennium. The seed for Academy Street, Mary Costello’s first full-length work came from ‘You Fill Up My Senses’, a story initially published in her remarkable first short story collection The China Factory.
That story features a child whose mother grew up in a big old house called Easterfield, as Costello’s mother did and as Tess Lohan, the protagonist of Academy Street does. The novel opens in the 1940’s with Tess, as a young child, attends her mother’s funeral. The loss is something she is too young to comprehend and prompts a withdrawal in Tess, which will last across her lifetime. It marks the beginning of a quiet yet intense life – shadowed by a wish to hover in the background rather than take centre stage – and played out against the backdrop of the major events of the second half of the twentieth century.
At the age of eighteen, Tess moves to New York to work as a nurse and despite being absorbed into emigrant life, she remains somewhat removed. A tentative romance offers the possibility of change, but when that relationship breaks down and Tess finds herself pregnant, she becomes isolated in an altogether different way, bringing up her son Theo on her own.
Tess’s experience of emigration becomes an American Dream of a different kind. Hers is not a life of success and fortune, but she is more than aware that living in New York allows her to be a single parent in a way that would not have been possible in Ireland.
On the subway, she contemplated an alternative life back in Ireland. A pall grew at the thought of the daily mundane, the restraint, the stasis. She could never have kept Theo. It seemed to her now to be a place without dreams, or where dreaming was prohibited.
As Theo grows, so too does a distance between the two. He resents her apparent passivity, not realises that Tess’s quiet life is a form of bravery in and of itself. Costello captures with great astuteness Tess’s inner complexity, her desperate wish to live life to the fullest and the melancholy which makes her always pull back. An introvert by nature, Tess gets her sustenance from within. She is happiest when reading and feeding her mind – ‘I am made for this, she thought’ – but knows she lives in a world where she is expected to be more actively engaged.
Costello also draws out how this interiority comes from a deep-rooted ache for home. Not just the physical home of Easterfield, but a metaphysical home where she might feel comfortable and loved. As readers, we are not asked to feel sorry for Tess, only to understand how she has come to be the person she is, and to ask ourselves what kind of life, society values and why that might be.
Like her character, Costello’s writing eschews extremes, instead focusing on the multitude of emotions contained in the ordinary. She is an extremely realist writer, teasing out the essence of what it means to be human when life still insists on being lived and grief must be carried in whatever way possible.
The prose throughout Academy Street is beautifully measured and carefully considered. Small details add a density and depth to Tess’s story and Costello displays a care for her character in such a way as to create a vivid portrait of an essentially lonely woman who has, at all turns, tried to make sense of her unexpected and changing life.
To depict a life story in a novel, particularly one this short, is no easy task. To do so with such a lightness of touch yet depth of emotion is quite remarkable. Academy Street is a deceptively powerful novel with a truly devastating emotional ending, which will stay with me for a long time.
READ On: BOOK
NUMBER READ: 472
NUMBER REMAINING: 274
20 BOOKS OF SUMMER: 11/20
