Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.
Everyone seems to agree that The Rachel Incident is a funny novel.
I don’t get it.
I couldn’t stop reading The Rachel Incident. It was gripping and relatable and I felt the confusion and despair and hope of our young trio – because, as much as the narrator wants to tell us otherwise, Carey is part of a trio.
Everything in this novel felt like a subplot. There is no overarching story – just the normal life of a normal 20 year old. There is just pile of side stories and narrative arcs that you may or may not be invested in. Abortion in Ireland, finding a job in the middle of a financial collapse, trying to make sense of the world straight out of your teens, first love(s), being gay when you can’t afford to be gay… a bunch of themes, all well-covered, that make up a whole web of stories with the same 4 or 5 main characters.
A glorious novel.