Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen

A powerful, acrid and sometimes very funny novel set in a crap town in Northern Ireland where there is not much to do other than get drunk and fight “the Prods” on Saturday night. It’s narrated by Majella, a young woman who I guess would be diagnosed as on the autism spectrum– she “flicks her fingers” to ease her anxieties, and has a sort of bloodless way of analyzing small talk, which she often doesn’t fully understand. Majella’s off-kilter view of humanity echoes that of “Convenience Store Woman,” which I read almost exactly a year ago, although Majella is a more carnal presence. The novel also has a “Groundhog Day” sensibility, one day the same as the next, as Majella shuffles from the ghastly home she shares with her pathetic alcoholic mother to the grubby fish and chip shop where she serves the same people the same food day after day after day.

One interesting note: I misread a crucial sentence fairly early in the novel, and my misreading led me to imagine a more complex back story for certain characters – which I thought would be revealed as the novel progressed. When I finished the book, I was somewhat surprised that the mystery (as I saw it) had not been resolved in any way… and I went back, reread the key paragraph, and saw that the mystery, such as it was, never really existed to be investigated at all.

The irony is that my misreading actually might have created a somewhat more compelling narrative. Perhaps it would have been melodramatic. But the point is that this is a book in which very little happens – it’s really a snapshot in time of a particular person in a particular place. The genius of it is that it is readable and approachable even though the place and many of the people are mean and largely unsympathetic. Even the narrator is at some level a grotesque.

Perhaps because of that, the novel concludes on a bright note that was, to me, not satisfying, but it’s a small thing in a larger whole that was satisfying indeed.

Photo credit: Meelan Bawjee on Unsplash