Molly Fox's Birthday Book

In this contemporary but timeless novel about relationships, identity, and home, Madden embraces the acting and playwright professions as central to the exploration of the human condition. The unnamed narrator, a successful playwright originally from Northern Ireland, is staying in Dublin at Molly Fox's house while Molly is in New York. Molly is a celebrated stage actress, a woman who seems mousy and nondescript in person but is charged with charisma on-stage. Moreover, she has a bewitching voice. "At times it is infused with a slight ache, a breaking quality.... " and ..."both a visual and sensuous quality, an ability to summon up the image of the thing that the word stands for."

Molly and said narrator have been best friends for twenty years. As the narrator struggles with writer's block during her visit, she traces Molly's steps through the house, fingers her treasures, sits in her garden, and recounts their friendship. Her memories includes their mutual friend Andrew, a successful TV art historian, specializing in memorials; Fergus, Molly's troubled brother; and Tom, the narrator's devoted brother--a Catholic priest who is also a dear friend to Molly. The day in question is June 21st, Molly's birthday, a date of penetrating significance that unfolds gradually through the narrative.

Molly, Andrew, and the narrator have built firm and lucrative careers. Each has shed their native skin and taken on new identities that, paradoxically, manifest a more palpable singularity and congruity of self. Whether it is escaping traditional familial bonds or facilitating a triumph in artistic pursuits, the three friends have remained a touchstone for each other. Molly is the enigmatic force; Andrew is the medium of transformation; and the narrator relates through acute examination.

"The closer you get to Molly, " thinks the narrator, "the more she seems to recede. Sometimes she seems to me like a figure in a painting, the true likeness of a woman, but as you approach the canvas the image breaks up, becomes fragmented into the colours, the brushstrokes and the daubs of paint from which the thing itself is constructed." For Molly, the actor, the stage is a point of departure; for the playwright, it is a final destination.

The narrator's musings often settle on Andrew, whose brother was a paramilitary Loyalist in the North and a poignant source of Andrew's pain. A dissection ensues in the narrator's mind as she digs into the deepest interstices of her psyche. She fuses the artifice of stage with the authenticity of life, recalling how an actor can be removed from the stage or a person can depart from your life but leave a resounding presence. "Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it." As several visitors drop by at the end of the day, surprised to find Molly gone, the narrator experiences some visceral and vital insights.

This kind of prose is rare and exquisite. Lean, poised, and elegant, the tenor is restrained and natural, dipped in elegiac quietude. The book packs a lot of punch in just over two hundred pages and leaves you exalted. Active silences peak into sublime epiphanies, and as the story spires, the characters inhabit you and burrow in the tender places of your heart.