Common Decency by Susannah Dickey: book review
Overview: Lily and Siobhán live in the same Belfast apartment complex. Lily works in the hospital gift shop and volunteers for the cancer charity nearby to pass the time. She's struggling to navigate the world without her mom, who was also her best friend. Siobhán has bounced through a few apartments and from working in a hotel to finally landing a coveted teaching position. While she's learning how to manage a classroom of kids, she's also navigating an affair with a married man. Lily escalates their relationship beyond neighbors when stalkerish tendencies arise and she becomes desperate to get closer to Siobhán. Overall: 3
Characters: 3 Here's the fundamental problem with the book. It's a dual narrative where both voices sound the same. Not just the same generic voice—no. The same extremely hyper-specific voice that utilizes the world's strangest vocabulary words shoehorned in left and right. While this would've still felt somewhat annoying and unnatural, I could've bought into it if it was the authentic voice of one of them— probably Siobhán who's obsessed with seeming cultured to her married boyfriend—but when Lily's voice also uses the same awkward vocabulary, the book somewhat lost me.
The other issue with that neither character really evolves or grows. They have no arcs. They just live on the page, never doing anything particularly interesting. Siobhán gets a bit more of an arc, a more defined tragedy and idea of loss by the end. Her biggest issue is that the thread about her becoming a teacher, navigating that, and her friendship with her co-teacher is really great. Hands down the best part of the book. But it's a sub-sub-plot. Siobhán's main story is her being driven to madness by the affair. This always feels like such a major dead end plot to me. There's nothing more boring than watching someone agonize over an obviously dead end affair. I don't care what twist you might or might not employ, it's a thread I can't ever buy into—a true reading pet peeve, so that aspect really sunk for me. But it's still better than Lily who's so deep in a grief pit that her life ceases to move at all. While very honest and real and sometimes creates interesting insights that pulled at my heart strings, it's not fit for a narrative. You can't just stay in grief in the same mode the entire novel. This is a minor spoiler, but her warped view of being desperate for connection after her mom is gone leads her to break into Siobhán's apartment and start messing with the girl covertly. Why this is the manifestation is never clear, and the whole thing is fairly bizarre. It's not connected to the character enough to feel like plot either. It just feels like Dickey was way in over her head trying to tell these two women's vaguely connected stories.
Plot: 3 I think I melded addressing plot and character above. I will say that there's no major action or tension until the 80% mark (I know because I read it as an ebook and took note when I went, oh, plot!). But it's also not presented in a coherent enough manner to make an impression. The whole point of the book is supposed to be about these two young women leading parallel lives. Dickey often oddly backtracks chapters and repeats scenes to shoehorn in moments where they were unwitting witnesses to each other's lives, like Siobhán observes Lily's coworker out at a bar after we've heard the co-worker tell Lily a story. This just creates continuity issues that aren't well-handled. When they do intersect, Siobhán has no idea. Lily messing with her apartment ups Siobhán's unraveling, but since Siobhán never knows it's Lily behind this (or that she's not just losing it), this connection also doesn't matter. I finished the book and truly wondered what its point of existing was.
Writing: 3 I've been pretty negative, but I will give it the points that while I questioned why I was bothering to read it the entire time, I didn't DNF it. And I DNF a lot. There was something that compelled me to keep going, even if it was just being confounded by all the authorial choices. I know I mentioned this earlier, but I'm still astounded by the mega thesaurus vibes here. I questioned the point above, and at times, it truly feels like it's just for the author to flex as many big words as she can. Which would make sense if it felt like she always had a firm grasp on what these words meant, but that's not true either. I guess this was a strange slant on purple prose, but I'd never encountered it in this precise way before—such a specific, detailed voice made totally generic.
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