Louise Nealon
Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between a children’s book and one for adults. Louise Nealon’s Snowflake* is marketed by her publishers as their ‘Lead Adult Title for 2021’ and as ‘a novel for a generation’ yet it seems like a book for teenagers. Debbie White lives on a cow farm with her mother, Maeve, and her uncle, Billy, who sleeps in a caravan in a field. It is reminiscent of the class reader, The Same Stuff as Stars. In that story, by American author Katherine Paterson, Angel lives on a farm in Vermont, with an uncle, The Star Man, in a caravan in a field. The two uncles introduce their nieces to the night skies and teach them to identify stars and constellations. Neither Angel’s mother, Verna, nor Maeve is capable of childcare: their daughters flail through the emotional trials of adolescence.
In addition to the childlike content of her narrative, Nealon uses simple diction, in terms of both vocabulary and syntax. It may be that she is trying to create a voice of naivety but as Debbie is 18 years old and has won a place to study English at Trinity College in Dublin she must surely have read a wide range of literary texts and through them learnt a fair bit about the world, as well as the words and sentence structures that can be used to describe it.
Debbie, the protagonist, mirrors her creator closely in that Nealon travelled that exact academic route and now, at a mere 27, also holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Queens, Belfast and has written her first novel. The events in Snowflake* do not go far beyond Nealon’s own experience of growing up on a dairy farm and transitioning to studenthood. She chronicles the life of an Irish girl: Sunday masses, folklore and myth. As a rites of passage tale there is educational detail about periods and shaving pubic hair but also darker material about rape, suicide and farming accidents.
Nealon divides the novel into sections from childhood and those centred on university. The most interesting are delicately re-imagined family moments. Maeve and her lover, farmhand James, take Debbie to the beach on a stormy day. Whilst her mother cavorts in the ocean, revelling in waves and spume, sulky Debbie treads the sand collecting shells. Many of the whirls and spirals are too battered for gathering. Is Debbie following in her mother’s footsteps to be left, like one of those seashells, broken on the shore?
As well as shells and stars, Nealon and Debbie express wonder at snowflakes and their flawed beauty. In Snowflake* these three phenomena vie for central importance with the White family’s superhuman gifts of prophecy and divining. The quotidian lives of the Trinity millennials shrink in the face of the natural and supernatural happenings down on the farm in Kildare. Either Nealon is not able to balance the dual aspects of the novel or she has chosen a genre, that of magic realism, which is beyond her reach as a writer. In the much quoted, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there is a portal in the form of a rabbit hole. The Connolly to Maynooth rail journey does not hit the spot.
Film and TV rights to Snowflake* have proved popular both at home and abroad and it may well be that Debbie’s Adventures in Ireland will soon reach viewers. The best scenes will be the ones depicting the weird and wonderful Maeve in all her eccentric glory. Louise Nealon dedicates Snowflake* to her parents’ wisdom, love and support so it seems that she, at least, had an admirable upbringing even if poor Debbie has been abused like an oyster robbed of its pearl.
Works cited
Carrol, L. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Macmillan. 1865.
Nealon, L. Snowflake*. Manilla Press. 2021.
Paterson, K. The Same Stuff as Stars. Houghton Miflin Harcourt. 2002.
A version of this review was first published on page 36 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 15th May 2021. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.
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