Breakdown by Cathy Sweeney: book review
Overview: One day, a woman wakes up in the morning and decides not to turn right and go to work. Instead, she goes left to the seaside town she grew up in that she hasn't seen in years. From there, she continues making choices that push her further afield from the Dublin suburb she lives in, from the family she's raised to maturity and the husband who sends impatient texts about wanting his gym bag brought to him. The book is told in a vignette style that plays with linear time. Each cluster of vignettes is arranged by the general place she's in where the majority of the scenes take place—the town, the boat, the train, the bus, the breakfast room of the hotel, etc. But she also dips heavily into memory and pulls us forward into her present time, working to contextualize these near term memories as she tells this story of her escape from regular life that is at once extremely mundane and truly wild. Overall: 5
Characters: 5 We are deep inside this woman's head as she analyzes every facet of her life, every relationship she's ever formed, as she blows up her life into chunks she'll never be able to put back together. The narrator is extremely human in a way that creates an immediate empathetic connection, even when she's revealing the thoughts we're never allowed to voice, being selfish, admitting to objective wrongdoings. It feels like she is doing this telling to understand and be understood.
While the book follows the narrator mostly alone, occasionally interacting with fleeting shop workers or baristas, there's a rich tapestry of other characters she draws into a vivid image with surprisingly spare description. These include her husband who is perfectly nice but emotionally removed and a little clueless, hapless. Her daughter who is a prototypical Gen Z uni student (I say as one myself), absorbed in her phone and synthesizing and broadcasting her emotions before she has truly felt them. Her son who went from a wonderfully sensitive child to a rude, hard, self-absorbed gym-bro, another trajectory that felt specific enough to the character of her son but also a universal commentary. Her best friend that became unrecognizable in her transformation into "mother", even as the narrator is a mother herself and was a mother first. The cast nails the personal to universal. They fit within the story, feel honest to her world, but also are clearly providing larger commentary on patterns we all either fall into or easily recognize.
Plot: 5 This is by far my favorite novel in the cluster we've seen in recent years that can loosely be described as "mother finally hits a breaking point and runs away" novels. It has the trappings—the haphazard escape decided on rather abruptly, a history of affairs and thoughts about sex, a frustration with the suburban existence and particularly a woman's role in that prototypical place, a woman as artist whose forgotten her voice. These novels are hard to pull off, hard to balance the razor's edge of carrying the reader along with you in this break from societal norms, into this realm of being selfish in a big, loud way from a character who is not typically allowed this. And in not losing them in the fact that we've all been children, a bit horrified at the thought of being abandoned.
I think what works about Breakdown is its directness, its rootedness in action and moment to moment recall. The franticness of the decision making and the pure desperation that isn't weighed down in shock factor give it an honesty—we all know how I felt about All Fours. We can feel the narrator struggle through every moment, chase peace or some kind of actualization in such a deeply honest way. It is a breakdown, and we see every element that precipitated it. By staying with the narrator so viscerally close, through the big picture and the small logistics of train tickets and arranging hotel rooms, there's a deeper understanding that emerges.
Writing: 5 I couldn't put the book down. I read it in 2 days, in 2 100 page goes. A part of this is that the font is big. But mostly it's that the book feels breathless. You wonder what she'll do next, where she'll go, even as the flashes to the present day show you where she ends up long before the end of the book. There's still plenty of tension in the getting there, in the why. As the book progresses, it loosens its grip a little. It feels more comfortable to divert from the detailed listing of every action, relaxing into more existential thoughts, ironing out beliefs that have become tangled beyond recognition.
I think I'm most impressed by how 200 pages manage to contain the entire world within this novel. Thoughts on motherhood, on being a wife, on forsaking yourself and your artistic impulses to bend towards the societally prescribed safety of a middle class existence, on grief and the loss of a parent causing a re-situation of your view as a child, in having complicated relationships with your parents and in turn creating complicated relationships with your children. There's being old enough to look back on the first iteration of your adult self and see the pitfalls in world view and the course corrections to try to fix this but also the expanse of life still ahead, long enough that suffering in silence doesn't feel tenable. There's a lot on being an artist and losing touch with that identity. Both in terms of practicality and in your vision evading you.
I'm a 22 year old girl. I can't really relate to being a middle aged woman trapped by circumstances and needing to flee. I am more closely related to the daughter who's abandoned than the narrator, but I really hope that doesn't deter people who don't fit the narrator's exact profile from reading it. More than anything, this is a book about how to be a person in a society and what to do when conforming and doing everything you've been told stops working. They're questions that resonate at any time of life, and they are beautifully explored in this novel. Truly excellent.
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