The trouble with actors

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride’s acclaimed, prize-winning debut, felt like a one-off, not the beginning of a career. Its prose style — a staccato, Beckettian rush — was a good match for the subject of burgeoning womanhood amid grief and exploitation. But it was also very intense — so much so that before the novel’s end the language started to break apart, as if McBride had, with her very first book, reached beyond the limits of her voice.

Yet here we are with a second novel and another young female Irish narrator with an unconventional syntax. This narrator (unnamed, like all the characters, until late in the novel) has escaped her family and moved to London to attend drama school. She would rather be pursuing her sex life than learning how to act — not necessarily out of any bodily desire but because status dictates it, just as it demands a flat stomach (‘without a flat stomach all the world is poisoned’) and constant boozing.