The Wild Laughter
The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes is one of our fiction recommendations for April. The Wild Laughter is Caoilinn’s Hughes’s second novel after her book Orchid & the Wasp and her poetry collection Gathering Evidence. Her first book Orchid & the Wasp (Oneworld 2018) and won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Awards and the Butler Literary Award. For her short fiction, she won The Moth International Short Story Prize 2018 and an O. Henry Prize in 2019. Her poetry collection and was the winner of the EU Prize for Literature. Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence won the Shine/Strong Award, and her works has appeared in Granta, POETRY, Tin House, and elsewhere.
You know the score if you have read our other reviews: when writing about a book I think it is helpful to include the blurb as this is what folks might first read if they picked up this book in a bookshop or in your local library. We are told of The Wild Laughter:
Its 2008, and the Celtic Tiger has left devastation in its wake. Brothers Hart and Cormac Black are waking up to a very different Ireland - one that widens the chasm between them and brings their beloved father to his knees. Facing a devastating choice that will put their livelihood, even their lives, on the line, that brother soon learn that the biggest danger comes when there is nothing to lose.
A sharp snapshot of a family and a nation suddenly unmoored, this epic-in-miniature explores cowardice and sacrifice, faith rewarded and abandoned, the stories we tell ourselves and ones we resist.
This book is a dark comedy and perfecting balances humor with devastation. Through the voice of our unreliable narrator, Hart, we learn the story of how the Black family patriarch landed the family in all consuming debt and the build-up to his death. I loved the characters in this book and the way they played off each other to create a hilariously dysfunctional family. The eldest son, Cormac, is the brains of the family and takes every opportunity to let everyone around him know. Hart is a lady’s man and the sibling that stayed at home to help with the farm while Cormac moved away for university and career-building in the city. Hart is close to his father who the family refers to as the Cheif. The Cheif is a hard-working farm man who oversees his land and home with a quiet strength. Nora, their mother, is a stoic pessimist and former nun, asked to leave the convent under mysterious circumstances. I cycled between loving a character and then hating them and then feeling compassion for them to being angry at their choices, and I love when a book can do that.
One of the themes of the book is family relationships: between siblings, between parents and children, and how these relationships are informed by the parent’s past. Both Cheif and Nora have complex and tragic backstories that influence their family life in the present. Cormac and Hart mirror the biblical Cain and Able. The resentment and one-upmanship of Cormac and Doharty provide some of the most comical scenes in the book. All of the characters play off of each other beautifully and highlight the worst in one another. I loved the character of Dolly, the love interest of both brothers and an actress with a penchant for storytelling and a big imagination. These relationships hold tension as the story speeds toward the Cheif’s death.
The time setting of rural Ireland in the post-Celtic Tiger is unique and was an excellent setting for this story which has elements of dustbowl/ recession-era boom and bust fiction. The voice and pacing felt like a mix of Beckett and Steinbeck and Hart describes the bad investments made by his family and neighbors, and we watch the Cheif work to recoup his losses while his body gives out. Having lived through the 2008 financial crisis, it was a familiar story, but I appreciated that the heart of the story was the aftermath, not the rose-tinted heyday. The ghost of money lost haunts the family until the bitter end.
Also, if you have read this one please let me know how you felt about the ending. I’m dieing to discuss it so let me know over on our socials.
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