“Acquired in a six-figure pre-empt,” says the back cover. “TV and film rights sold to... the team behind Normal People.” The title has an asterisk, explaining inside the flap that “snowflake” means “sensitive, complicated, intense, flawed”. The first sentence of “about the author” tells us that she is 27. Snowflake is a novel by a young woman who studied English at Trinity about a young woman studying English at Trinity.
The narrator’s mental health is fragile, she doesn’t keep up with her classes and she’s given to sexual misadventures that make her feel worse. A reader might think that we have seen this before, and also that the marketing at least is directed towards a demographic into which many readers of The Irish Times probably do not fall.
As the kids would say, yes but no. Snowflake is well-written: Louise Nealon has the knack of neat similes (a screen saver “floats definitions of words across the monitor, like fish on a modelling catwalk”), and though the narrator Debbie is indeed an 18-year-old who can’t cope/won’t cope with the step from school to undergraduate life, she’s also curious, knowledgeable and darkly funny.
The pace is brisk and the narrative has an eye for comedy even when the narrator is enjoying a moment of self-pity. There’s a painfully delectable moment when the therapist at the university counselling centre follows the form asking Debbie to rank symptoms of anxiety from 1 to 10, with 1 asking her to rank her satisfaction with the therapist from 1 to 10; anyone familiar with modern third-level education will wince and grin.
Debbie has more obvious reason for her distress than some recent literary heroines. To the horror of her new vegan friends, she lives on a dairy farm and rises early – most of the time – to help her uncle Billy with the milking before taking the train to Dublin. Billy lives in a caravan behind the house where Debbie, her mother and her mother’s 25-year-old lover spend their time.
Billy drinks (“there are as many types of alcoholics as there are stars in the sky and I’m glad I’m the social kind”). So does her mother, Maeve (definitely not the social kind), drinks. Maeve also sleeps most of the time, dances naked in the nettles (“they’re natural needles that inject you with a happy chemical”) and devotes most of her waking hours to writing down her dreams. She fell pregnant at 18 and doesn’t know who Debbie’s father might be, can’t be trusted with money, doesn’t work and takes little part in running the house or farm.
After an accident on the farm, Maeve becomes delusional and dangerous to herself. Billy goes on coping for a long time, but he runs out of patience with Debbie’s more ordinary troubles: “You’d want to cop on to yourself… College handed to you. Car handed to you. Lessons handed to you.”
By way of contrast, we have Debbie’s new and only friend Xanthe, living in the spare Dublin apartment of a friend of a friend, pretending to Debbie that she bought her €200 boots from a charity shop and also depressed and anxious, starving herself but never thin enough, in love with her gay best friend, unable to please her parents. Debbie greets Xanthe’s diagnosis of depression with rage: “You paid a doctor to tell you that you’re special. That you’re sad and edgy.”
Everyone in this novel thinks they have real problems – even, in the end, the secret psychologist in the village who can help some of the others – and most of them are right. The ending doesn’t exactly solve anything, but it does assert a joyously unconventional way forward for those broken in heart and spirit.
This isn’t a perfect book; a subplot about prophetic dreams is convenient to the plot but unconvincing, and a thematic emphasis on literal snowflakes doesn’t earn its keep. But Snowflake is much more than the tribute act suggested by its hype. It a sweet, clever coming-of-age novel that finds charity and depth for its older characters as well as the young, and I look forward to seeing what Louise Nealon does next.
