By Natalie Wall
Niamh Mulvey’s debut short story collection, Hearts and Bones, captures contemporary concerns about the challenges of communication and connection in an increasingly reified society, and explores these through everyday life and familiar characters. Set mainly between Ireland and London, these are stories about family, love, friendship and shame told through quiet but sometimes brutal details. Mulvey, originally from Kilkenny, is based in London, and Hearts and Bones explores the particular relationship between Ireland and London. Hearts and Bones is Mulvey’s first book, having previously spent ten years working in publishing as a commissioning editor. Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Southword, the Irish Times, and Hearts and Bones has its origins in these magazines – ‘Blackbirds’ first appeared in The Stinging Fly and ‘My First Marina’ in Banshee.
The stories possess a paired-back realism. No emotion is overwrought or overwritten and characters feel devastatingly real through the frequent silences of their speech. The collection’s first story ‘Mother’s Day’ introduces one of the collection’s core themes of strained relationships, as a mother and daughter navigate an art gallery on Mother’s Day. Issues of money, class, illness, and estrangement lurk behind the spare prose (“It was her fault that I had so much”) and the brevity of this first story makes the portrait of the maternal relationship even more poignant. The stand-out theme across Heart and Bones is class. Mulvey examines the difficulties caused when family members transcend the class they were raised in – often leaving their family ‘behind’. The mother-daughter relationship in ‘Mother’s Day’ is characterised by tense dialogue, where jibes and criticisms are concealed by seemingly neutral language. “I need some of his money”, the mother says, referencing her son-in-law and subtly calling attention to her daughter’s social climbing. The daughter responds, “I’m pregnant”, appealing to shared maternal experience in an attempt to feel her mother’s pride “for one tiny second”. Readers witness these women straining further apart even as they attempt to connect throughout the story, illustrating the alienating effects of the class system as the daughter’s middle-class aspirations leave the pair with less and less in common, despite the assumed closeness of the mother-daughter relationship. The uneasy relationship is clear from their first exchange, one of only a few direct exchanges between the two in the whole story.
While writing Hearts and Bones, Mulvey said she “decided not to think of the stories as stories at all, but as songs”. She elaborates, “I was just trying to create an interesting sound, a sound that was true to the spirit of the feeling between the characters”, thus giving rise to the subtitle of the collection, Love Songs For Late Youth. The sense of stories as sounds, as fleeting but arresting moments, is particularly fitting for this short collection which stands at just 159 pages.
Many of the stories are about childhood, adolescence and the relationships that define these periods. They often feature characters looking back at these periods in their lives. These stories are about the big and small events that happen during formative years and their effects, as well as how perspectives on these years may change in the future. Big events, like mental health crises or teenage pregnancies, are told with the same simple language as when describing eating in a café or relaying mundane conversations. However, everything seems loaded with an underlying tension which propels these stories forward, reflecting the charge of these teenage years and relationships, where every conversation feels fraught and every action second-guessed.
The story ‘First Time’ is about a teenage couple planning their first sexual encounter and the anxious excitement that accompanies it. Mulvey cuts the tension surrounding the sex by setting the dramatic climax of the story as a break-in at one of the couple’s homes. In doing so, Mulvey highlights the way that romantic relationships, especially teenage ones, can enable overthinking and exaggerated emotional responses. By describing the break-in more through more details than the sexual encounter that the story is named for, (as well as illustrating the violation of intimacy that a home-break represents in through lines like “The sounds – movement, things being opened – were soft but violent”), Mulvey deftly highlights how even positive experiences can become frightening and threatening in the anxious mind.
Human connection is another key concern of the collection and it explores the intricacies of relationships with ourselves and others. Mulvey has said that “there are all these stories unfolding within us and without us all the time – how insane it is we ever manage to connect at all, given how different our perspectives can be.” This notion of ‘stories within ourselves’ is paramount to the collection, where various characters seem caught up in the stories they tell about themselves, relationships, family, the world, more than the reality of their lives as seen by the reader. ‘Childcare’ and ‘The Doll’ epitomise this as Mulvey explores people and perspectives on the periphery of the ‘main’ character’s life, allowing the narrative to explore the different realities that co-exist.
The sense of disconnection that permeates Hearts and Bones seems to represent a particularly contemporary anxiety. An anxiety regarding ‘correct’ behaviour in the stories contains a kind of performativity to them, as if they are acting the role of the child, friend, or partner in some pre-conceived way. Although the internet and social media are notably absent from the collection, the characters’ anxieties around ‘correct’ behaviour and reactions, the feeling of disconnection from those around them, and worries about how they may be perceived by others, allows Mulvey to examine concerns often linked to the digital world in analogue spaces. The concerns of the twenty-first century, while perhaps exacerbated by the digital world, are presented as perennial. The same issues of alienation, self-consciousness, and disaffection that have existed across history in different ways – the difference is the medium through which these anxieties play out. Therefore, Mulvey’s choice to eschew technology throughout much of the collection does not detract from the stories feeling relevant: they always will be relevant. For instance, the narrator in ‘My First Marina’ struggles to separate the performative aspects of her grief from the reality of her feelings; Julia, the ten-year-old child in ‘Childcare’, feels that she “has no centre”; and Dar in ‘The Doll’ needs to touch real objects when he feels himself retreating into his own head, projecting his insecurities outwards onto a puppet.
In ‘My First Marina’, the narrator negotiates guilt over her perceived role in her childhood best friend’s suicide, constantly deferring to Marina in her mind as she tries to decide how to act within her romantic relationships. What initially appears touching quickly becomes dysfunctional, as we see how the narrator cannot function separately from Marina’s memory. The spare brutality of Mulvey’s style is on full display here as the narrator thinks “I had never meant to hurt anyone. I had just gone around with a big hungry appetite but didn’t everyone do that?”, simultaneously trying to absolve and blame herself. The constant comparisons to Marina cloak the narrator in an unhappiness that seems like it will never lift, as she comments “she would have thoroughly disapproved … Marina would never get herself into this kind of situation … She had too much integrity … Surely that was what Marina was trying to tell me …”. Despite being only twelve pages long, the story feels episodic as we witness the narrator’s total inability to move on from her friend, framing all her decisions through the eyes of Marina in a way that is both frustrating and heart-breaking.
It’s inevitable that Mulvey, as an Irish woman writing with a precise prose style and an emphasis on navigating relationships in adolescence and young-adulthood, will be compared to Sally Rooney. However, Hearts and Bones might be more appealing for fans of Naoise Dolan’s bitingly direct dialogue in Exciting Times (2020), and those interested in the realist short stories of Huma Qureshi in Things We Do Not Tell The People We Love (2022), where relationships are similarly placed under the microscope.
The collection’s epigraph is from Chekhov’s My Life, and it gestures towards the characters’ insecurities: “I missed her fearfully, and could no longer deceive myself, and tried to get other people to deceive me.” This primer on self-deception, and the way we can deliberately use others to shield ourselves from uncomfortable truths, succinctly reflects Mulvey’s achievement with this collection. Hearts and Bones is not full of action-packed stories, but quietly conveys real emotional heft. There is not much thematic diversity – the stories rarely waver from the familiar subjects of family life, intimate relationships and challenges of adolescence. However, these themes are continually tackled in intriguing ways across the slim book. It will be exciting to see if Mulvey sticks to these themes of relationships, love, class, and shame in her debut novel The Amendments, coming in 2023, and how she explores them over a more extended narrative.
Natalie Wall is an English Literature PhD student at University of Liverpool having previously completed her masters in Literature and Modernity at University of Edinburgh and undergraduate in English Literature at Durham University. Her research focuses on contemporary trauma literature and theory, particularly representations of the traumatised body and the public reception of trauma fiction. Currently her research is focusing on the engagement with trauma fiction in online spaces and the limits of traditional academic criticism for understanding and addressing these emotional responses, using post-critical theory. She is also a freelance writer and has had previous work published in The Sundae, Digital Fix, Bindweed Magazine, Lumpen Journal, The Independent, Horrified, Refinery29, and VICE UK.
Contemporary Irish Literature 