John Patrick McHugh’s first novel begins with a teenage boy and a teenage girl, alone in the woods on a summer afternoon, engaging in what puritanical educators used to call “heavy petting”. “His finger was burrowing inside her. They were kissing and then they were doing this. He was the horniest, he was seventeen.”
The scene is a tease, in several senses. Neither boy nor girl at this point get anywhere, so to speak (“My arm’s gone dead”). And the unwary reader is led by such an overture to expect from Fun and Games a comedy about the squirm-inducing hopes and humiliations of teenage sexuality, in the vein of Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers or the TV series The Inbetweeners. But this isn’t at all what Fun and Games is up to. To begin with, more than 100 pages pass before we get another sex scene – though, of course, like the teenagers we’re reading about, we keep fruitlessly expecting one.
The book’s viewpoint character, in whose company and consciousness we spend a chunky 390 pages, is John Masterson, who is in the middle of his “pivotal” post-Leaving Cert summer. The year is 2009. John lives on an island off the coast of Mayo. He hangs out with the lads (Rooney, Studzy), and works shifts in the local hotel restaurant, the Island Head. He has been freshly called up as half-back for the local senior Gaelic team. The girl in the woods is Amber, who also works in the hotel restaurant. Amber is 19 and appears to John’s gauche male gaze enigmatic to the point of impenetrability. Will they? Won’t they?
This is very familiar material. But the contemporary Irish novel that Fun and Games might most closely remind you of is Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, another novel that takes a suite of apparently familiar characters and a bog-standard narrative framework and subjects them to intense pressures of empathy and perception in order to produce something luminous, a carefully fashioned object. Which is to say that McHugh is no mere grey stenographer of middling provincial dreams but a stylist, a shaper of the world in prose.
Like all beginning stylists, he has his ascensions and his wobbles. But when he’s good, he’s great. More or less the first thing we hear about John’s mother, Yvonne, is that a private photograph texted to her illicit lover has done the rounds of the whole island. Here’s John’s reaction: “He had studied his mother’s tits. Much like any milfy duo obtained from the internet – fingertip nipples, blue veins etched like lightning bolts – but devastatingly his mother’s. John hated her, and the whole Masterson family, and for a time everyone alive.”
“Milfy duo” is good – perhaps a tiny bit too good, actually – but it’s the adverb, “devastatingly,” and the rueful retrospection of “for a time everyone alive” that bumps this particular riff up into a space above mere cringe comedy. Here is McHugh’s method in miniature: the prose fireworks are almost always at the service of the book’s large project, which is to use the resources of a tightly curbed irony to usher us into the mind of a young man who doesn’t yet know how to be in the world.
More gorgeous touches: the “blemished cotton” of roadside sheep; John’s conception of having a future at all is “The wrong shape, like the plug sockets in Spain”; of a local girl: “Her mother was from somewhere not Ireland”; on the ways in which the ambient culture finds its way into your mind: “A yellow-reg zoomed by and John thought, passively: English wanker”; a drunk John tries to express his anger: “it was hard to fully recall the intricacies to why John was so in the correct”; a joint, burning, is “gold, apricot”.
Also remarkable is that Fun and Games is unapologetically and prismatically about being a heterosexual teenage boy: ashamed of your constant horniness, finding the remarks of women completely baffling, discovering genuinely meaningful forms of physical expression out on the pitch with the other lads, wanking over classical paintings when nothing else is available, fretting about your body more or less exactly as young women do (preparing for a night out, John inquires of his friends, “And I don’t look fat, do I?”), McHugh renders with pointillist care John’s inner and outer worlds, until the character stands clear.
It isn’t perfect. It’s too long. It veers too thoroughly away from the dangers and rewards of opening out into other minds, other worlds. There is a sense that this big talent, first time out, has bitten off slightly less than it can chew. Next time, I suspect, things will be different. In the meantime, here is a first novel by a writer with gifts to spare.
Kevin Power is associate professor of literary practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin
