Genrekonventionen can offer resourceful authors a framework that gives support to exuberant ideas. The Irish writer Liz Nugent is such a resourceful author, and if the word “crime novel” weren’t on the cover of her book “Little Cruelties”, one would forget while reading that it’s actually regarding a murder, so cleverly the author dissects dysfunctional family structures.
It begins with a funeral. The three brothers of the Drumm family are present, one is in the coffin, two are mourning. But who is dead and who is alive is to be unraveled on the following 400 pages.
Nugent is a master of form and language. In their introduction, an unnamed first-person narrator reveals himself to be one of the brothers and a potential murder suspect, but there is no indication as to who it might be. Then the search for clues begins in two parts. In the first, each brother separately narrates his memories in first-person form. Completely lost in the stream of thoughts, places and times change, from childhood in the Irish home, to the fratricidal struggles growing up, to career paths that ultimately lead through Europe and America.
Just before the explosion
William, the eldest, was the mother’s darling and established himself as a film producer. Luke, the youngest, is a successful pop star who has passed the peak of success in his mid-twenties and is struggling to cope with dwindling fame and money. And then there’s Brian, who is always somehow on the sidelines even when the siblings tell stories and likes to be arrested as a scapegoat, as William says in memory of a horribly escalated Christmas: “Because that’s how it was in our family , someone always had to be the butt of ridicule, and on this Christmas day it was Brian.”
Liz Nugent: “Little Cruelties”. crime novel.
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Image: Steidl Verlag
When do these little taunts and cruelties become too much? What prompted the fratricide? Nugent plays with the classic “whodunit” concept, which alone searches for the culprit, and expands it with the question: who is actually in the coffin? The author learned her craft from the great English-speaking modern and postmodern writers. The multi-perspective narrative and the immersion in the characters’ stream of thoughts are borrowed from the work of their Irish compatriot James Joyce.
Structure and form are reminiscent of William Faulkner’s novella “As I Lay Dying”. In it, too, siblings alternately tell their view of the family history and add new details to what another person has already reported, thus questioning perspectives and motives for actions. In addition, a second idea connects Nugent with Faulkner: Both authors focus on the figure of the mother, but allow it to emerge almost exclusively from the children’s point of view. But in contrast to Faulkner’s mother figure, who told of romantic young girl dreams and their failure in the harsh reality of married life and farm life at the beginning of the 20th century, the mother of the Drumm brothers is significantly more complex.