AS YOU WERE

An Irishwoman avoids dealing with her cancer diagnosis in this debut novel.

When Sinéad Hynes, a property developer and mother of three boys, is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she keeps the news of her illness to herself. She avoids telling her husband, Alex, that she's ill even after she has been hospitalized and refuses to let her children visit her. Instead of lingering on her own mortality, Sinéad spends her time in the ward observing her fellow patients. Chief among them are Margaret Rose, who manages her daughter’s pregnancy from bed, and Jane, who suffers from dementia and recalls a friend’s troubled pregnancy from decades earlier. As Sinéad’s health grows worse, however, her efforts to avoid her family and the reality of her situation become increasingly difficult. There is much to admire and respect in this debut novel from Feeney, also an accomplished poet, but also much that even readers who enjoy a challenge will find frustrating. Feeney is obviously an immensely gifted writer, with a gift for both dialogue and inner monologue: In one striking passage, Sinéad rationalizes lying to Alex by telling herself, “It was a dreadfully selfish thing to do to another person, fill him up with worry and uncertainty, to try and make him figure out death, because that’s a dead end, a spiral, even though it’s always there, inside us all.” But her denial about her condition, even to herself, can make her feel like a device for Feeney’s considerable linguistic pyrotechnics rather than an emotionally engaging character in her own right. Though the female body is powerfully described in this novel, by avoiding the specifics of Sinéad’s cancer diagnosis, Feeney renders cancer a symbolic bogeyman instead of a disease.

An arresting debut that impresses more than it moves.