Oona

by Alice Lyons

In Alice Lyons' implosive first novel, Oona, child of first-generation American migrants, lives in an affluent New Jersey suburb where conspicuous consumption and white privilege prevail. A silence surrounding death extends to the family home where Oona's mother lies dying of cancer. As her inner life goes into shutdown, Oona has her first encounters with sex, drugs and other adolescent rites of passage.What does a voice alienated from itself sound like? How can the creative process be truthfully represented? In this remarkable debut, a female character's fraught journey into adulthood is rendered in vivid colour. Oona, the emergent artist, encounters the physical world and the materials of her craft, engaging with her losses through Ireland's culture and landscape.As boom turns to bust, Oona's story, articulated without the letter 'o', inhabits a world of fracture and false promise, conveyed by elision yet miraculously made whole and real in the telling.

Genres: Fiction

279 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2020

Reviews

[David Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel without the letter ‘o’ - the difficulty, one imagines, would be in the monosyllables: to, go, gone, do, don’t, won’t, would, one, you, your, or, of, on, for, from, no, not. Other words have synonyms, circumlocutions not all of which read seamlessly – equines for horses, sans for without, zilch for zero, vessels for boats, u for you, yeller (!) for yellow.
Then there are the loaded words: mother, woman, love. One imagines this is the point. The early loss of the narrator’s mother to cancer is felt as an amputation, an ‘ectomy’ the loss of which “—na” learns to cope with. When the mother visits in a dream-memory, the letter ‘o’ is wonderfully restored, as it briefly is in quotes and in poetry.
What impresses in Oona is not so much the formal challenge Alice Lyons has set herself as the vividness and sensuousness of the recollections, particularly those to do with art and its substances. One all but tastes the pigments, hears the rattle and squeak of charcoal, feels the buzz of a pencil sliding over the weft of canvas.

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“True silence is an interval, a space, a blessed rest within a restless gale.” Alice Lyons’ novel Oona is an arresting work of fiction in which the titular narrator tells the story of her life all without ever using the letter ‘o’. Sometimes, a novel with a rule like that can feel gimmicky or even forced, but Lyons rises to the occasion — surpasses it, even. With two exceptions (those being ‘-na’ in place of her own name and G-d in place of ‘God’), it is hardly even noticeable that this restriction has been put in place, the prose flowing so naturally. The skill this takes should not be underestimated — I flirted with the idea of writing my review without ‘o’ for all of sixty seconds before knowing that even a couple hundred words would be immensely taxing, let alone a whole novel. Oona is even more remarkable for how it blurs distinctions between prose and verse and how it explores topographies: geographical, natural, political, social/interpersonal, and internal. Through an impressive myriad of lenses, including ideas of sex as either shame or “learning by living”, of how speech “makes inner language public” and painting allows “undivided self-speech. Language flimmering in my veins”, Oona finds she can save herself from her loss and trauma through art and love and beauty, especially in the beauty of the sea. Oona, who declares “I wasn’t a self. I was leaky. Leaking”, implores (herself? us? to write “that unheard language”,— in doing so herself, she patches up her self.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Aligning with writerartists that are thriving in their entirety, that have lives making and writing despite everything, watching their lives and ways and figurings is a shame cure. Reading them, their diaries, tracts, hearing their lectures, watching their interviews, films, life tales, figuring their living strategies. This helps keep a writer artist suicide-free while standing with writerartists in their fragilities, waywardnesses--their many justified despairs-as we are all in the swirling shame swamp, which the Twitter feed isn't reflecting" (213).

[Ciara Dunne · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you like lots of lists of words and chat about pigments this book is for you. It wasn’t for me.