The Amusements is Aingeala Flannery’s debut novel, published last year. Flannery is a writer and journalist whose short story “Visiting Hours” (which features some of the same characters as The Amusements) won the 2019 Harper’s Bazaar short story competition, and I thought that this book reads more like a series of short stories or vignettes than a novel. The chapters that make The Amusements follow the lives of a set of characters in the coastal town of Tramore, in County Waterford, Ireland. 

There are two “main characters”: Helen Grant and Stella Swaine, whom we meet for the first time when they are just high-school students dreaming of leaving their hometown, and whose lives we follow for a couple of decades, as they drift apart. Other chapters are only indirectly related to them and follow instead the hopes and fears of a diverse and picturesque set of characters whose relationship to Tramore —often a mix of love, hate and nostalgia— defines their lives in different ways, even after they’ve left. The main character is actually the town, coming to life through different eyes, dreams and memories through the years. I enjoyed reading Flannery’s ode to Tramore, whose critical eye dissects with humour the comings and goings of its people.

The other characters that populate the streets of Tramore come from all walks of life: they are outcasts, gossipy mothers, spinsters, handymen, musicians and rebels, drunken fathers, and aspiring artists. As we follow them around their daily lives we get an idea of the affairs, rivalries, impossible love stories and petty dramas they are involved in, but also of the cultural and societal struggles underneath (domestic violence, religion). The way the book is structured reminded me a bit of James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which is probably why it was hard for me to read it as a novel. Each chapter follows a character in a specific period of their lives, often reminiscing about the good old days, or daydreaming about leaving it all behind. I found most interesting those chapters narrated in the first person, especially those narrated by Helen Grant, which kind of frame the whole thing and give it some cohesion. After a story titled “Tramore” in which we’re introduced to the town, its caravan park and the caretaker, Helen narrates her first encounter with Stella Swaine in high school, and she also narrates the last story, twenty years later, seeing her Stella at her mother’s funeral. 

Although most stories have a witty, incisive and sardonic style, those narrated by Helen were, I thought, the most amusing (pun intended), perhaps because Helen is the only character who has some kind of growth through the years, even if she never leaves Tramore. However, I found Stella Swaine to be a very annoying character, which did put me off the book a bit. Stella has fiery red hair and dreams of living in New York City. She is a rebel and a feminist and everyone has a crush on her (most importantly, Helen), but she is also selfish and I thought she was a very unidimensional character, or at least quite cliché. She reminded me of those memes of female characters written by men, the issue being, of course, she was written by a woman. In many ways, Stella is the link between many of the characters and much of the character’s psychological depth comes through on the page through their relationships with her. 

My main issue with the book was that, in general, I felt that there was never enough development to get the book out of the picturesque vignettes and into an actual character study or something deeper. By the end of the book, I felt like I was missing something. Doing further reading on the genesis of the book, I do feel like it should have been published as a collection of short stories rather than a novel, because apparently Flannery was working on a novel that didn’t get finished, and she published these stories as a novel instead. I think the stories would work better if read individually. For a novel, however, I think the characters could have been developed much more, or Helen and Stella, at least. 

I am all in for the “no plot just vibes” kind of books, but I did not find the “vibes” to be enough this time. I am a big fan of short stories where nothing happens, but where you can see there are loads of psychological stuff going on just beneath the surface —like with Katherine Mansfield or Anton Chekhov—, or where micro actions show some deep current of emotion or trauma in the characters, or the whole iceberg theory Hemingway talked about —I could talk about “Hills Like White Elephants” but I won’t. I love when a book shows just the surface but suggests many more things. In The Amusements we can see that, under that calm and neighbourly facade, there are issues like alcoholism and domestic violence, etc., but I thought the author got carried away with portraying Tramore in a vignette-like, postcard-town kind of way, and didn’t really develop the characters or the stories further.

However, I haven’t been to Waterford, but while reading The Amusements I felt like I was visiting Tramore. If there is a thread connecting the stories, it is the characters’ deep connection to the land, a theme that I have found in many other contemporary Irish books. Most of the stories deal with nostalgia in different scenarios: some characters have a home they dream of escaping, some of them leave home just to find themselves incapable of shaking off the hold it has on them, and some never leave, but miss the way their home was in the past.

Have you read anything by Aingeala Flannery? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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