Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This short novel deals with a surprising number of themes (art, theater, religion, The Troubles, the nature of the self), but to me, it is most interestingly about intimacy, friendship and communication, and about how sometimes a certain distance is essential to a more meaningful and lasting closeness between people.
The story’s narrator is a renowned playwright who has temporarily house-swapped with her good friend, Molly Fox, a famous stage actor. Molly lives in Dublin and the narrator is borrowing her house in order to work on a new play. The action takes place over the course of a single day, Molly’s birthday. Molly herself is in New York, and emphatically does not recognize her birthday, since it is also the anniversary of her mother’s abandonment. The relationships between Molly, the narrator, a third friend, Andrew, and their families are mostly explored through the narrator’s reminiscences throughout the day, but as evening falls, the characters we’ve been introduced to appear in person.
The narrator is a playwright from a big, loving, conventional family she never felt she could truly fit in with. She is closest to her eldest brother, Tom, a Catholic priest. At college, the narrator befriends Andrew, a disgruntled academic who resents his small, vulgar family and his older brother, a Loyalist paramilitary who is later murdered. Later, the narrator meets Molly Fox, who also has a close, complicated relationship with her troubled brother, Fergus.
These three friends are self-contained, undemonstrative people who remain close – but not too close – over the years without really ever acknowledging the nature of their connections. Molly is repeatedly described by everybody as particularly difficult to know (“Molly doesn’t do intimacy.”). She throws out important information and personal confessions at noisy, odd moments, but spends long, quiet evenings revealing nothing at all. The narrator, a playwright, is a keen observer of human nature and spends paragraphs describing the minutiae of any particular interaction while (sometimes hilariously) missing its broader implications entirely.
All the characters are particularly interested in objects – knick-knacks, jewelry, clothing – and these symbols are dwelt on in great detail. People are contained and known entirely through these tokens of their person, even when they themselves are absent. As the narrator wonders upon waking in Molly’s bedroom in the novel’s first pages: “What kind of woman has a saffron quit on her bed? Wears a white linen dressing gown? Keeps beside her bed a stack of gardening books?”
Thus, Andrew’s brother is contained in a ring. Molly’s house, with its carefully considered tokens, is more expressive about her life than she ever is herself. Andrew comes to know the world through the contemplation of artistic objects, and his own laborious personal transformation is entirely described by the clothes he wears and the way he furnishes his home.
In a representative passage, the narrator is angered by Molly’s ironic purchase of a fiberglass cow because, she says, “What bothered me most about this was that I had thought I knew Molly well. We had been friends for over twenty years now, and with the exception of Andrew, she was the last person I would have expected to go in for this type of whimsy. . . . I wondered why I hadn’t said this to her. I had always thought we knew each other well enough to be completely honest, at least about something as trivial as this.”
After wondering about the saffron quilt and the white linen dressing gown in the scene quoted above, the narrator interrupts herself: “I was reluctant to pursue this line of thought because I suddenly realized that, lying in my bed in London next week, she might do exactly the same thing to me. Given her particular gift she would be able to reconstruct me, to know me much better than I might wish myself to be known, especially by such a close friend.”
“Especially by such a close friend,” “at least about something as trivial as this” … these sort of qualifiers are frequently included as if they would be self-evident to anyone, because these friends respect nothing so much as each other’s space. As the narrator sits with Andrew in the garden at the end of the day, she tells us, “He fell silent again, and as he sat there quietly thinking about all of this, I almost did something extraordinary, something that might have ruined the delicacy of the moment. I almost closed my hand gently over his hand, where it lay resting on the table.”
That she does not do so, and would never do so, is the key to these three people – their reserve is probably the reason for their friendships’ longevity, but, as the narrator perhaps realizes too late, it is also what keeps them from establishing anything more. For the reader, however, it is what makes these people and this novel so interesting, endearing and unique.
