Tender: A Novel
by Belinda McKeon
Little, Brown and Co. 416 pages, $27.
IRELAND has changed dramatically over the past half-century. Ragged gypsies aren’t huddled with barefoot children on the bridges over Dublin’s Liffey River, begging for alms—a common sight in the late 1960s. The low-level but savage sectarian war over Northern Ireland that began in 1968 seems to have finally run its course. In 1993, Roman Catholic Ireland decriminalized homosexual relationships, and last year it became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage via public referendum.
Irish-born writer Belinda McKeon puts some faces into this drama in her novel Tender, which considers the turmoil generated for her characters against the backdrop of peace talks that would end the violence known as The Troubles. Born in 1979, McKeon grew up on a farm in Longford, Ireland. She now lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Rutgers. Tender takes place primarily in 1997 and 1998, just as a truce was being negotiated in Ulster.
McKeon has described her novel as “autobiographical at its core,” though with purely fictional characters. It’s set on the campus of Trinity College, Dublin, where the author was an undergraduate. In her prize-winning first novel, Solace, McKeon portrayed everyday yet distinctive characters who quickly came alive, and Tender again demonstrates that skill.
The novel is told from the standpoint of Catherine Reilly, an engaging if self-absorbed straight woman with rural roots who has just finished her first year at Trinity. McKeon links her up with nineteen-year-old James Flynn, described as funny, smart, loud, and a good mimic—a likeable guy who hugs and kisses people on sight. He is not a student but works as a photographer’s assistant in Berlin. Flynn is gay, but largely closeted. When he returns to Dublin to visit former housemates, he discovers Catherine, who’s renting his old room. The two immediately click. They and a vibrant bunch of pals (booze-swilling, hashish-smoking) are dazzling experts at what the Irish call “the craic,” jovial-but-serious exchanges in which sharp wit is the goal and acid commentary on others’ actions or dilemmas the output.
McKeon has a fine ear for dialogue, and for language in general. Tender is replete with punchy idioms, many linked to sex, such as “snog” (to kiss), “shift” (to make out with), or “shag” (to have sex with). Country people are put down as rubes or “culchies,” while “eejit” dismisses anyone with an unwelcome opinion. Identities are efficiently fixed with shorthand, as when a man from Tyrone who catches James’ eye is tagged “Nordie Liam,” a reference to his Ulster origins.
The author also excels at plot and description. Early scenes, perhaps predictably, involve coming out. James tells Catherine he’s gay and expresses frustration that he has no boyfriend. She reassures him that he will find someone. When his mother becomes distraught after James comes out to her at the family home in Leitrim, he phones Catherine and begs her to join him there, which she does. But Catherine takes on tasks without being asked, like outing James to a few friends in the guise of “protecting” him. Her solicitude evokes the novel’s title, as she becomes James’s “tender,” one who tends or takes care of him, but with a catch. She points out suitable men, for example, but withholds approval of anyone he comes up with on his own.
In the fall, with James back in Germany, the two begin writing near-daily letters laced with humor and affection. Like the correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, these missives simulate love letters. “I miss you so fucking much. I miss you all the time,” writes James. “I miss your voice. I miss your company. I miss your God-awful jokes.” Moreover, as Catherine muses to herself, the letters are not e-mail, with which “you did not have the heft of the pages, the life of the ink woven right into the paper, rushing across it, [but]a thing that had come directly … from the pen in their hand, which was … almost like touching them for yourself.”
Tender adroitly links a main story of personal power—the dominance Catherine exerts over James and the need for her to abandon it when he takes up his own life—with a secondary narrative in which Westminster is forced to relinquish direct rule over Northern Ireland. McKeon interweaves these accounts seamlessly, and they resonate. The personal story credibly depicts a relationship that is intimate as well as volatile. Since that story is seen through Catherine’s eyes, it is clear how panic at losing James drives her obsession. We can also see that, in spite of James’ anguished talk about how hard it is for him to live openly as a gay man, she doesn’t get it—and we can surmise that this inability to be understood is at the root of his desolation.
McKeon offers a line from a Ted Hughes poem, “What happens in the heart simply happens,” implying some things can’t be explained. Tender deals with several such imponderables, including the maturing of teenagers and the evolution of modern Ireland. It made me think of Edna O’Brien’s ribald 1960 novel, The Country Girls, also an autobiographical coming-of-age tale—copies of which the author’s parish priest burned in their village churchyard. Thankfully, McKeon’s vivid, equally bawdy, completely absorbing, and more sexually inclusive work has not suffered similar treatment.
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Rosemary Booth is a writer and photographer living in Cambridge, Mass.
