Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna: ReReview
I read this book when it first came out in 2024 and was getting a ton of hype online. It was actually one of the books that I downloaded on my kindle for the Dublin/London trip I went on that fall that ended in me moving to Dublin a few months later. And I've always associated this book with that time, giving a fond tint to the still lingering impression that the book didn't quite live up to the hype. Still, being in a reading slump and having just been in London for horrible heat, I wanted to revisit Oisín McKenna's debut book to commiserate about the heatwave, if nothing else.
The book worked so much better for me this time around. Not that I didn't enjoy it before. It was a solid 4 star read. But the distance from the online buzz and also the fact that I live in Dublin and have visited London many times now, especially the Dalston area where many of the book's characters live, it feels much more visceral.
In a lot of ways, I think this book is helped by the reread. There's been nearly 2 years since my last read, but I was well aware of what I was getting into—a huge cast with point of view switches every couple paragraphs. Where I found this tedious to track before, this time around, it felt like an exciting series of baton handoffs in a race towards all these bottled secrets exploding. Of course, there are times where McKenna nails these switches better than others. At its best, the book is incredibly smooth as it passes into each character's head either through the POV character running into the next POV character or thinking about them, in a way that it feels like starting a new leg of the race. At times, there's not the differentiation or there's a little bit of head hopping that happens, particularly towards the end. By that point, I was so invested and used to the switching that it didn't bother me. I don't know if I'm just an even more experienced reader now or simply had the advantage of already having a basic understanding of all of the characters, but I wasn't bothered by the same things this time around. I found the characters far easier to keep track of.
I actually think McKenna leveraged using so many different voices really well. When Caroline O'Donoghue spoke to our class, she talked about the importance of driving drama and tension in contemporary books. That everyone should be trading in various secrets with high personal stakes. Evenings and Weekends is a masterclass in this. It follows a web of interconnected characters, mostly friends and partners from their school days and their parents, that are all holding life changing secrets from one another and struggling over the course of a London heatwave with whether and how to tell the various information to the people they love. It's an interesting exploration of the unsaid. And McKenna using so many points of view lets the reader understand just how much tension is wound up in these relatively mundane days. Going into the book fully understanding how this is a novel about one very small community rather than about a central person helped me appreciate how well McKenna does what he specifically set out to do.
More than anything, though, this reread just proves that so much of our impressions of books are swayed by what's happening in our lives, how old we are, what we've experienced, what we are familiar with. A book that was just fine before, I suddenly couldn't put down because I understood the nuances far more. I was shopping at Lidl last night, I've done that Ryanair flight between Dublin and London a few times, I'd just felt the heatwave and watched all the internet chatter around it. I yelped at the end of the book when Rosaleen namechecks my local library, where I picked up the copy I was reading. And while these characters are older than I am, I have also had experiences in the last few years that brought me closer to their life phase. While they're all staring down the end of the life they know in different ways, so am I, being at the end of my master's program. I'm thinking about where I'm going to live, how my friends are scattering, how to face a new and uncertain phase of life. So instead of just being an entertaining novel for a train ride, I felt deeply emotionally invested in the book in a way I wasn't before because I was being invited to work through my own fear and excitement and anxiety alongside these characters.
Sometimes a book takes multiple reads. Sometimes a book takes a revisit a few years later. So much of the novels that sparkle do this simply because they found you at the exact right time. I'm glad I randomly decided to pick this up for a reread.
Overall: 4.5
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