The Detached Drama of ‘Lazy City’

“This terrible thing happened and nothing changed; not even me, really.” What does it mean when an author purposefully ends a sentence on a weak note? In Lazy City, the debut novel from Belfast-born writer Rachel Connolly, a great number of sentences end with words like “is,” “to,” “it,” “this” “them,” “that,” and “really,” creating a vague, limp tone that suits our heroine-narrator, Erin, just fine. (“I ignored them.” “It wasn’t like that.” “It seems obvious I have to.”) In the wake of an unspecified personal tragedy, Erin has fled her graduate course in London for home in Northern Ireland. People in London wanted to talk about the tragedy, so she returned to the only place where she knew no one would care. The novel’s first-person narrator is hiding a great deal, often in the middle of sentences, and by denying the finish, Connolly helps bury the lead. A promising young woman—funny, unaffected, and always put-together (she pauses to apply make-up every page or two)—Erin has sought the questionable comfort of moving home and becoming a loser. She has two dweeb sort-of-boyfriends, a humiliating job as a nanny, and a gay best friend with a catchphrase (“Thank you for the sparkling company, my darling”). This is why she can’t end her sentences proudly: It’s a lot easier to vaguely refer to your fling with a local loser as “it” (“The length of time it went on for and the back and forth of it”) than to let a sentence end on the name “Mikey.”

Having grown up with the brash, bohemian women that dominated 2010s popular culture, Connolly has penned a book that is very much post-Broad City, post-Fleabag, post-Girls. She sees herself as part of a generation that has defined itself in opposition to these cultural touchstones. As Connolly observed in a recent interview with Jemima Kirke of Girls, “Hating on the show was, I think, a way to demonstrate that you saw yourself as more self-aware than the characters it featured.” But for all the harm those characters did to each other, the Park Slope Food Co-op, their parents, and various men—the openness of their millennial feminism wasn’t just obnoxious, it was also a way of coping. When it was relegated to the dustbin of cringe, something was lost. Lazy City is a book about the damage done by that kind of self-awareness. What does it mean to suffer when your pain is played out? And while Connolly’s debut is not quite Conversations with Friends in Tehran, the Belfast locale begs a second question: What does it mean to suffer in a place where your problems are less important? When Erin’s mother says “You aren’t the first person to have had something bad happen to them” the implied big bad is not the struggles of other women in early adulthood but the dizzying death toll of seething sectarian hatred.

Finding themselves the only two early morning runners, Erin explains to her American not-quite-love-interest that “this is not a 5 a.m. run kind of place. Or even a 7 a.m. run kind of place. We’re lazy.” It is “A lazy city, as well as a small one.” This lack of energy has a calculated, deadening effect. Belfast is a sleepy place and this is a novel in which many scenes end so people can go to bed. Yet, as attested to by the novel’s very existence, and as affirmed by its protracted descriptions of local color, a non-global city is of significant interest. Because of the long trail of the troubles, Belfast has been deleterious in modernizing. It is still a city with “so many milkshake parlors here, for the Christian teenagers who don’t drink”; a place where you can still visit “a pub with four floors, each one full of a varying quantity of old men with scraggly beards and brown leather jackets, teenagers, and people who started drinking here as teenagers”; a city small enough to be united by slang like “he’s all right craic,” “yous are mad,” and “that’s class.” It’s a place where you know everyone, in every bar, and at every restaurant, and, no matter how boring they are, you always have to chat.

Those days are ending. Belfast is gentrifying—people are moving in and nice apartments for them are being constructed on former bomb sites. At one point during “afters” (which is, I believe, Irish for coke binge) we find Erin cataloging the gauche nonsense in a friend’s sister’s luxury building: “Silver kitchen appliances, white cupboards, white sofas and purple cushions. Horrible.” Then, looking out the massive floor-to-ceiling window she sees “the convenience shop across the street, with half the lights on its sign out, Fuck IRA scum spray-painted in black on the brick wall.” She quips: “The view doesn’t match the rest of the flat.” One of the newcomers is the American, a university professor on the sabbatical of his choice; he’s doing research for a novel. “Why has he stuck a random character in Belfast?” Erin wonders, “If he came here because he thinks it’s a crazy place, or weird, or interesting,” or, perhaps, to go “back to an earlier, purer version of life.” Then again, she notes “I could ask myself that question too.” For Erin, as always, is self-aware. The Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998—it is hard to imagine her having gone home to grieve a generation ago.

The unflinching frankness extends to sex: She is a caustically keen observer. After a fairly crap date with the American—he has told her that “[stand-up comedy is] a very raw form of storytelling”—she finds herself back at his place “probably too tired and too drunk to get wet enough to have sex anyway.” But as he begins to roll out the stock phrases—“Your ass is amazing” “Does that taste good?” “You like this. You like the way my dick tastes”—Erin regains interest, albeit with her usual hangdog halfheartedness. “I know it’s cheesy and embarrassing, aggressively heterosexual and unenlightened, but it turns me on anyway,” she says. “I started watching porn with this kind of talk, maybe even these exact sentences, when I was too young to know it was cheesy and unenlightened and just thought it was hot. I still think it is.” Even though Erin can’t help but describe the encounter in the most morbid way imaginable—it ends with “grey slime seeping into his stomach hair”—she does, when it comes down to it, enjoy herself. This is Erin’s attitude toward life: She is so self-aware that she can not only intellectualize why her pleasure is false and stale and vacuous, but also understand why doing so would be enormously passé. She denies herself even the pleasure of self-hatred.

Connolly’s novel is small and contained. She has created a visceral character and placed her in distinctive scenery. Her writing is well-observed (replete with opinions on everything from people who use the term “technocapitalism” to the rise in the price of Ketamine) and highly detailed (she, for example, subtly connects the tragedy and Erin’s need to eat vegan french fries). Forcing out a sentence-swallowing, self-aware heroine and filling a novel with her reluctance is refined, honest, and realistic but even an interior drama needs tension, surprise, thrills. I wish Connolly had allowed herself some set pieces, something cinematic—if only for the narrator to be resolutely underwhelmed. There is a brilliant novel here if only Connolly would stop worrying about the optics. Action, coincidence, and drama may be cheesy, embarrassing, and unenlightened, but sometimes stories, like sentences, need to end with a bang.