A short lesson in literary bondage to begin this week’s review. Oulipo is a style that looks to impose certain restrictions on the writing process as a way to acknowledge the inherent restrictions in language itself.
An acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (or Workshop for Potential Literature), it was established in France in the 1960s where a group of intellectuals, headed by the poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, came up with a systematic, self-restricting way of making texts.
If writers are always constrained by something – language, time, perception etc – then Oulipo asks what literature might become if the restrictions are more finely tuned. Unsurprisingly, given its origins, the form seeks to combine science with art.
The book explores Oona's move to Ireland as a young woman in the 1980s
A classic example is the technique known as n + 7, which replaces every noun in an existing text with the noun that follows seven entries after it in the dictionary. Because writing a novel isn’t hard enough.
Oona, the debut novel from Alice Lyons, uses (one imagines) a less time-consuming type of Oulipo – the book, aside from the title character, is written entirely without the letter O. It is an impressive feat for a new author whose style perversions are not simply meant to dazzle but rather to reflect the recurring themes of her book.
What we destroy by trying to omit parts of our life, or parts of ourself, is the central focus of Oona. Told in the first person in 99 short, titled sections that blend prose and poetry, the book is an intriguing, innovative take on one woman’s journey to find herself.
Loss comes early for Oona. Her mother dies when she’s still a child. In suburban New Jersey, illness and death aren’t acknowledged, at least not to children, and as a result Oona spends much of her life haunted by her mother’s cancer, by a sense of incompleteness, of time obliterated.
Going in search of lost time has been fertile terrain for fiction writers for centuries, and so it proves for Lyons, whose debut was a winner in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2018. Originally from the US, Lyons is a versatile artist who has lived in the west of Ireland for 20 years. A recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry and the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, her other accolades include Radcliffe Fellow in Poetry and New Media at Harvard University 2016/17 and an IFTA nomination for her poetry film The Polish Language.
These past endeavors have looked to bring literature into new contexts, something that is clearly evident in Oona. The artist’s sensibilities are thoroughly examined in her book, sometimes to the point of indulgence, with numerous sections given over to discussions of colour: “Ultramarine Blue can be black in a puddle until the hue leaks wild at the pinguid edges. Cerulean Blue – very much itself, unkeen re: mixing.”
There are obvious parallels with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Han Kang’s The White Book, though both these titles have more discernment in structure and style. Lyons overreaches at times in Oona. Later sections of the book can feel directionless (do we really need a description of rip.ie?), a bit indulgent, or as the narrator says of herself: “I had a few making/seeing/listening skills that wanted practising. There was a sieve need.” The book is full of thought-provoking observations but these can get lost amid too much blurry, impressionistic writing.
Honesty and integrity
Two compelling narrative strains hold things together. The first is the narrator’s ode to her mother: “Her mind, its acuity and wit stranded in an acre-subdivided suburb pressing against the sage-green painted walls.”
Latterly the book explores Oona’s move to Ireland as a young woman in the 1980s. In the circumstances and also the reflective tone of the voice, there are similarities to Molly McCloskey’s quietly brilliant novel When Light is Like Water.
For Oona, Ireland is a place where she can learn her mother new again. She arrives at a time where it was still uncommon for a woman to travel and relocate on her own, and is therefore, like McCloskey’s Alice, something of an oddity in the community.
The outsider’s eye gives a wonderfully detailed picture of 1980s Ireland: “In Bewley’s, I drank brewed java, the single place it wasn’t instant and awful. I admired the Tiffany lamps in the Nat'l Library . . . Pale, wide-eyed men with Jesus hair and beards, their skeletal frames wrapped in blankets, began appearing in news clips that autumn. They were in an H-shaped jail called the Maze in Belfast.”
The loneliness of self-imposed exile is also vividly rendered. Throughout the book, as the narrator looks back on her life, the level of detail is outstanding. There is a real sense of honesty and integrity in the writing. The letter O may be missing from Oona, but this is a searing debut that refuses to omit anything else.
