Fiction:This is one of those books you don't so much read as recognise. For here, in prose of easy immediacy, is the stuff of an Irish childhood in the second half of the 20th century. Ham sandwiches wrapped in the sliced pan wrapper.
Barbie dolls lying, long-leggedly naked, in inexplicable places. Dusters made from a pair of men's underpants chopped in half. Slaps across the back of the leg from an adult driver who would reach around, exasperated, from the front of the car. Red Choppers. Remember those? A cool brand of bicycle before branding - or even cool - had been invented.
But this isn't one of those tedious, self-consciously stylish 1980s novels which set out to name-check as many obscure, and deservedly forgotten, products as possible. This is a book about people. More specifically, it's a book about a family. A reasonably ordinary - if more than usually well off - Dublin family, known within the narrative as "Mum", "my father", "me" - Bunty, aka Lucy Bastonme - plus siblings Pie (female), Ollie and the Frog (male).
Two elements make Kelly's writing leap off the page. One is her portrait of Lucy's father. A taciturn man with a penchant for booze, the German language and coal tar soap, he is disappointed in his youngest child, who has a stammer and a lazy eye, and whose school reports - by her own admission - leave a lot to be desired. His daughter's feelings, meanwhile, are summed up in a sentence: "He'd taken his shirt off to make the most of the day and he had his new swimming trunks on: navy, draw-stringed and unintentionally trendy - the word Nike embossed in large letters along the leg. They made me feel sorry for him; I didn't understand why".
YEARS OF MISERY memoirs, with their weary catalogue of physical and sexual abuse, have conditioned us to be wary of Irish fathers, and so - alerted, perhaps, by the narrator's habitual mode of address: always "my father", never "Dad" - we read on uneasily. The book's pacing cleverly exploits and amplifies the unease, as does the photograph on its cover, a black-and-white image of a white-faced child kissing a wrinkled forehead. As the pages turn, sex inevitably rears its head out of a mire of fascination and confusion. But the surprise in this story is both inevitable and genuinely unexpected. I defy you to predict it, and I'm certainly not going to give it away.
Suffice it to say that With My Lazy Eye is no horror story. It has been compared to the work of a young Edna O'Brien; but it made me think of Lorrie Moore's Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? or Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees.
It's a coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories, a book whose heightened reality you first lose yourself in, then find yourself loath to leave. Because here is Kelly's second - or, most probably, her first - strength. Hers really is a fresh new voice in Irish fiction. She's 38; not as young as a "young novelist", perhaps. Nevertheless, for a first novel, this one is . . . well, what? Confident? Skilful? Full of observations to die for: "the hum of the humdrum"; "the soundtrack of me leaving"? It's all of those, and laugh-out-loud funny as well: the scene in which Lucy, having wangled a job as an editorial assistant to a London publishing house, tries to impress a group of arty colleagues in an Indian restaurant, would give Bridget Jones a run for her money. And how about this for an instant evocation of sleaze? "His hair, side-parted and slicked back, dripped generously over his head and ears, as if poured from a frying pan . . .". She's very good at the yuck factor, is Julia Kelly. Dammit, she's very good, period. Let's hope she has lots more stories to tell.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
With My Lazy Eye By Julia Kelly Lilliput Press, 224pp. €15.99
