Academy Street
The small size of Costello’s debut novel belies its strong emotional impact and the complete life contained therein. This is the story of Tess Lohan, born in rural Ireland. She is young when her mother dies, but old enough to remember her mother’s affectionate touch, the way she tended the chickens, the way she made toast. Now the house in rural Ireland doesn’t feel like home; her baby brother is sent away to live with an aunt, her father is both sad and angry, and her older sisters are looking to leave by getting married.
Tess grieves, quietly finishes school, trains as a nurse, then follows her sister Claire to New York, which in the 1970s is anything but quiet. What Tess wants most is to belong, to be loved, yet her fear of action, of noise, of reaching out, leaves her drifting. The few risks she takes have lifelong consequences; the biggest one results in her son, Theo. Tess adores Theo, but her reticence and emotional naiveté keep her from fully engaging, and he disconnects, unwilling to let her live through him.
Readers may want to shake Tess into action, into making overt choices rather than letting life simply happen, and indeed Costello supplies several cataclysmic events, to no avail. Tess remains quietly competent, obedient to her fate, and an excellent observer of her inner self. This, above all, is what makes Costello’s writing so compelling: in every sentence, Tess narrates her life as it unfolds, revealing the loneliness, desire, and despair inherent to some degree in all of us. Even though Tess cannot connect with her own life, she touches every reader, perhaps enough to persuade us to engage with the possibilities in our own lives.
