Lazy City by Rachel Connolly

First published in the UK in 2023; published by W.W. Norton & Company/ ‎ Liveright on October 3, 2023

Lazy City is a snapshot of a young woman’s life in modern Belfast. Since it isn’t much more than that and since her life is largely wasted, I have mixed feelings about the novel.

Erin was dating Mikey before she moved away to attend a university. She always felt a distance from other people but felt less distance from her college roommate Kate. She had difficulty processing Kate’s death. After a few weeks, she walked away from her academic life and returned to Belfast. Erin stayed briefly with her violent and unforgiving mother before it became clear that she was not welcome. This is the backstory of a novel that opens with Erin working as Anne Marie’s live-in nanny and cleaner.

Erin is a lonely party girl. She knows her housing situation is temporary and that she’ll need to find a new place to live (and thus a new job) if Anne Marie reconciles with the husband from whom she separated. Erin avoids thinking about her future by getting drunk most nights, sometimes adding coke or ketamine to the party after the bars close. She hangs out with her friend Declan, a gay bartender/artist whose physician father is from Sri Lanka, but otherwise tries to avoid people who know her.

Erin doesn’t know if she wants to reconnect with Mikey although she knows she will. She gets along with Mikey’s brother, who might be the novel’s nicest character (apart from Declan), but he has serious drug and alcohol problems. While she’s pondering what to do about Mikey, she meets a somewhat older American who is teaching English literature at Queens. She has mixed feelings about her drunken decision to sleep with him. She is soon sleeping with Mikey or the American a couple of nights each week.

Both Mikey and the American might have other relationships they are concealing from Erin. Why this should bother Erin baffles me since she isn’t telling either of her sex partners about her other sex partner, but Erin nevertheless feels victimized. Still, she manages to address her concerns with both men without hysteria or other pointless drama, which is to her credit.

Erin is bright and straightforward, not given to pretension. The American uses words like technocapitalism that he can only vaguely define. Erin wonders whether he is posing. She suspects that people like to blame capitalism for problems because it’s easier to repair economic systems than to repair people. She’s glad that the American doesn’t try to talk about the Troubles because he would probably say something that is culturally insensitive, or maybe she would, although she understands the people who survived the Troubles never talk about it.

Erin doesn’t feel she can tell anyone about the pain she associates with Kate’s loss. She isn’t particularly religious but she visits empty churches, lights a candle, and shares her life with Kate’s spirit.

Erin’s internal monologs, including her conversations with Kate, are sometimes insightful. She isn’t sure why she has sex with the American or Mikey. She chalks Mikey up to being a habit. She keeps sleeping with the American because “the loneliness in him means something to the loneliness in me.” Or maybe it’s the “sense that his vulnerability makes mine less obvious? That I have the upper hand?” Only later does it occur to her that he might be asking himself why he wants to have sex with her.

Rachel Connolly creates a sense of intimacy with her unadorned, conversational writing style. She portrays Erin as a likable but troubled woman, the kind of person for whom it is easy to be both sympathetic and impatient. Erin wants to be true to herself, but she seems to think that her true self should be drunk and high most nights. She needs to get her life together. That’s presumably the novel’s point. By the last chapter, as she makes New Year’s resolutions, it’s clear that she understands what she needs to do. It’s less clear that she has the will to do it.

Novels like this one, depicting a few months that aren’t going well in the life of a young woman, seem to attract publishers. I assume they attract readers or publishers wouldn’t buy them. I often feel a bit disappointed when I read them, perhaps because my impatience with the troubled young woman overcomes my sympathy. Erin’s epiphany — that her return to Belfast was an act of running away but also an act of running toward something — is a bit obvious, particularly after Erin spells it out for the reader. So is the last sentence, as Erin leaves a church and starts walking forward, presumably charting the path that will be the rest of her life. (I hope that’s not a spoiler, but I’m not sure how it is possible to spoil a story that has no real ending.)

The novel doesn't amount to much, although the writing is sufficiently sharp that I am hesitant to condemn the story as shallow. I recommend it as a decent slice of life story about yet another troubled young woman, but I can’t recommend it as anything more than that.

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