Customer Reviews

Molly Fox's Birthday

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This story explores the lives and personalities of a small circle of highly talented, intelligent and very likeable friends. While friend Molly Fox, an unusually accomplished actress, is visiting New York, the narrator, an Irish playwright who lives in London, is borrowing Molly's house in Dublin while she tries to regenerate her creative juices. During the course of one day, which happens to be Molly's birthday, the narrator reflects upon their lives as well as those of other closely connected friends and relatives. From time to time, throughout the day, various people from the past and present are encountered, much like the visitations from Ebenezer Scrooge's ghosts. Described in highly accessible and very literate prose, each of these reminiscences and encounters add new revelations to the narrative. Eventually, the lives of these intelligent and appealing people are fleshed out, ultimately coming to a very satisfying conclusion as the day ends. I strongly recommend this novel to those who enjoy fine literature and well constructed prose.

I find myself drawn to Irish writers lately and when I had the opportunity to read an author I was unfamiliar with, I jumped at the chance.

"Molly Fox's Birthday" is a first person narrative which takes place over the course of a single day. The narrator is a close friend of Molly's who is using her house in Dublin for a couple of weeks while Molly is in New York and London. The story opens in the morning, closes with the evening, and the 220 pages in between interweave the narrator's story with that of Molly (a very famous stage actress who possesses an incredible voice) and Andrew who is another friend of theirs. The stories are told via reminisces and conversations with three different people who stop by during the day, not realizing that Molly is away. All kinds of relationship complications, career progressions and even the political hostilities taking place in Northern Ireland are addressed.

The book is well-written and incredibly insightful regarding family/personal relationships. There were several times when I dog-eared a page since there was that beautiful moment of truth that leapt off the page. While not overly heavy, by any means, it does take patience to read since the narrative slips back and forth between past and present without warning so the reader needs to pay attention or risk getting lost. The fact that there are such beautiful, insightful passages also means it will be most appreciated by a reader who is not in a rush to get through it but willing to take the time to savor it.

I enjoyed the novel immensely and would recommend it to people who like a more meandering read - not terribly linear or fast-paced, but very, very good. If you are fan of Irish writers, this would be one to try.

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.

Isn't it amazing how we can have life-long close friendships with people we don't know at all. Not our closest 500 internet friends. Rather, think of the friend who has a lake house that you not only have never been invited to, but that you aren't even aware of.

How many of us think that friendships have rules? How many friendships develop, though, based on the rules unilaterally determined by only one of the two? And, once realized, does that thought, and hurt, occur only to the one who didn't set the rules?

And, how many friends do we introduce, only for them to be closer friends to one another than either is to us? And which of our three main characters; Molly, Andrew, and our nameless narrator, fills which types of friends' role?

I don't know if this is best described as a-day-in-the-life-of or a-life-in-the-day-of story. Either way we get to spend three lifetimes in less than three hundred pages.

Madden's writing is so good that it doesn't get in the way of the story. If you like character studies, grab this and read it slowly. This goes well with chocolates and a cuppa.

Whenever I read a book, the first thing I notice is the quality of the writing. And here, Ms. Madden impressed me. I don't mean that the writing stands out, per se, as artful or affected. I mean that the use of language and voice were instantly compelling. The story, consisting almost entirely of remembrances, was at times somewhat slow. Still, the fullness of the writing and of the main character (whose name, ironically, we don't learn) make the story one to savor at times, even as very little happens. This is not a novel to race through, and indeed, it took me a few tries to get started as I tried reading it in small increments, but once I could sit down with time to enjoy and give the novel the attention it deserves, I enjoyed it.

Molly Fox is a well known and highly respected actor. While staying in New York, her friend, a well-known playwright, preparing for her next "project", is staying in her house in Dublin. The unnamed and self-declared closest friend and admirer, is the narrator of this ode to love and friendship as she spends a day, Molly's birthday, reflecting on her friend, her own situation and the close relationships that have influenced her life since she met Molly some twenty years. Deirdre Madden draws the reader quickly into a web of memories, recollections, meandering musings that glide effortlessly from one important person in her heroine's life to another, jumping through timelines, back and forth, with the greatest speed, peeling off one layer of her inner life after another.

The house of an absent friend of long standing can easily trigger many and diffuse, even conflicting reminiscences and it does so in this novel. Molly's house, full of her assorted collectibles, is not only significant for leaving imprints of the multiple facets of the actor's very private persona that stand in sharp contrast to her public, charismatic stage image. It also plays a role as the confining stage for the narrator's imaginary play into which she summons all the primary and secondary characters that have played and/or are still playing an important role in her own complicated life. Through her heroine Madden explores the different, often seemingly incongruous personality facets that individuals in public roles, especially actors, playwrights or priests, reveal when within their private spheres, their family or close friendships.

While Molly is a constant off-stage presence and the hook, skewed mirror or screen for all the narrator's other mental stage appearances, she herself remains opaque and contradictory... Her brilliance on stage, her charismatic voice contrasts sharply with her shyness and "dowdy" appearance in a cafe next door. However, can we believe the narrator? Is she a reliable source? She appears often surprised by a new facet she has discovered in her friend over time, often referring to herself as "obtuse" when it comes to understanding Molly. She is more definite in her assessment of her other close friend, Andrew. Andrew, her old chum from university days, stands out as a pillar of a trusted friend through thick and thin and their relationship comes across as mutually enriching and supportive.

Andrew is by far the most interesting and best developed character. He, like Molly, and the narrator herself have come from modest and difficult social backgrounds, touched on by Madden by relating it to the period of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland.

Andrew, even more than the other two, has succeeded in breaking free from the constraints of his family and milieu. Dropping his accent that would have defined and limited him, he has changed in more ways than one. Eventually, as an art historian, he reaches the height of success and public admiration, while retaining his integrity and moral grounding. In another important parallel between the three friends, each has developed a special relationship with one sibling. These family ties add another layer of complexity into the web of relationships among the friends that is increasingly fluid and can eventually hold some surprises for the narrator.

The concept of "human parallaxes" - perceived changes in the person observed from different angles - and introduced by Madden's protagonist, is more than aptly applied to all the central characters, including the narrator herself. Yet, she appears to have been the least grounded, preferring to see herself as a reflection in the eyes of her friends. She can drift in and out of reflections on what should be decisive periods in her own life, only to switch the focus quickly back on some memory concerning one of her friends. Usually placing herself into a passive observer role, she nevertheless draws attention to herself all the time. While recognizing that memories and mental journeys can play havoc with time sequences and factual probabilities, at times the narrator's associations come across as somehow too predictable, the coincidences too convenient and her self-absorption or judgmental arrogance concerning others slightly overbearing. As a result, her voice loses impact and can turn repetitive and flat instead. The day draws to a close with important questions unanswered, the narrator as central character left with less than shades of brilliance. [Friederike Knabe]

This is a wise, gentle, little novel, perfect in its containment -- the British edition lovely to look at and hold in the hand also -- but one in which very little happens. The setting is Dublin, in and around the house of Molly Fox, a celebrated actress on the British stage. Molly herself is away in America, and has lent the house to a close woman friend, the author of her first great hit and frequent collaborator ever since. The unnamed playwright narrates the novel, which spans a single day: Midsummer Day, Molly's fortieth birthday, although the actress seldom admits her age and never celebrates her birthday, for reasons that will emerge later in the story. Molly remains offstage; indeed, almost everything in the book takes place offstage, elsewhere or in the past, though it is no less meaningful for that.

The narrator tries to work, goes shopping, meets a few people, returns home, watches television for a while, and entertains a couple of unexpected visitors. That is all. But Deirdre Madden is extraordinary in her ability to weave a rich texture of memories and reflections into this quite ordinary day. And Dublin holds many memories, for although the narrator was born in Ulster and now lives in London, she studied here at Trinity College. One of her friends at Trinity, Andrew, is also from the North, but on the other side of the religious divide. While she herself comes from a large rural Catholic family and her brother (a most attractive character) is a priest, Andrew grew up in Belfast, where his brother was a member of a paramilitary Protestant organization. Andrew's life has largely been a matter of casting off his background and redefining himself; he is now a celebrated art historian and a popular figure on television; the sequence where the narrator watches his program on memorials is one of the intellectual highlights of the book.

It is no accident that the three major characters are an actress, a playwright, and an explainer of images. The difficulty of finding one's true self is Madden's major theme. Molly Fox once described her teenage years as "a voice, screaming and screaming inside my head: Who am I? Who am I?" She has made a career out of inhabiting other selves. The playwright has a gallery of selves to call upon in her writing; she quotes a therapist once telling her: "Your real self? Ah, if only such a thing existed!" While she will learn much in the course of the day, she has done little to define herself since leaving college, making her a sympathetic but curiously anonymous cipher in the center of the novel. In terms of his thirty-year development, the most successful of the three may be Andrew who "...had won through to some kind of moral knowledge, and it had matured him. He had successfully integrated these shocks and disappointments not just into his life but into his self, his sense of who he was. It was quite an achievement."

I thought of many other authors while reading this: Virginia Woolf (MRS DALLOWAY) for her contained feeling for family dynamics; Marilynne Robinson (HOME) for her moral center; Anita Brookner (LEAVING HOME) for her feminine intellect and sensibility; and the very different Eleanor Catton (THE REHEARSAL) for her extraordinary understanding of theater. All these other authors reach a little beyond Madden into another dimension, which would have truly merited a fifth star. But MOLLY FOX'S BIRTHDAY comes as close as possible to four-star perfection.

"Molly Fox's Birthday" is one of the most unsatisfying books I've ever read. I enjoyed it as I read it, for the most part, but when I came to the end, I wasn't left pondering the questions about art that writer Deirdre Madden raised. I wasn't considering the character development. I was just thinking, "That's it?"

The book is experimental with its structure. In the main action of the novel, nothing really happens. The unnamed protagonist, who is watching the house of her friend Molly Fox, just sort of walks around, thinking. She's trying to write a play and she's reached a block, so she spends much of the book reminiscing on her encounters with Molly, her friend Andrew, and her brother Tom. Her relationships with these people are very interesting and the experimental nature of the novel was brave, but in this exercise of tell-don't-show, there is virtually no character development, no apparent and concrete statement about theatre or writing or art, and no real attempt made to delve into the human condition. Deirdre Madden's writing teases that there will be and, as I mentioned before, the narrative poses questions about the way people relate to art, but it stops there. Instead of examining those questions, Madden uses her protagonist's busy mind as a way to move onto the next topic. Frustrating to no end.

What took away from the book in a much bigger way was Madden's maddening dialogue. Every character speaks in the same exact way. It's a shame, because the characters have such well-developed backstories and Madden obviously put a lot of thought into who they are as people. But every line of dialogue is interchangeable. The dialogue is prosaic to the point where, were you to eliminate the quotation marks in the novel, it would be impossible to distinguish what was dialogue and what was description. For a book that tries to examine what it means to be a playwright, it's a shame that the dialogue is outright terrible.

I didn't hate the book. There were even sections of it that I really liked. For every one of those, there was another sequence that went on for entirely too long (a scene where Andrew rambles on for many pages near the end of the book comes to mind), but there was a good chunk of decent, readable material in the middle of the novel. I wouldn't read it again, and I certainly couldn't recommend it to anyone. It reminded me of the much superior novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog. While The Elegance of the Hedgehog had a similar quiet and unconventional structure and posed a lot of the same questions about art as this novel did, The Elegance of the Hedgehog examined those questions and searched for answers through characters that spoke like, behaved like, and could be believed to be real people.

Unfortunately, Molly Fox's Birthday does not have any of that going for it.

5/10

We join the novels' nameless narrator, a playwright and friend of "actor" Molly Fox on a hot June day while she house-sits for the absent Molly. Here in the home Molly has created the reader is introduced to the absent birthday girl by way of her wonderful garden, the cherished mementos with which she had filled her Victorian abode, and the feelings and memories that these items evoke within the narrator as she retraces certain aspects of her long association with Molly. Various people come in and out of the house on this day and each person conjures a different Molly memory that ultimately leaves the reader asking "Who is this elusive and chameleon like Molly Fox?"

Perhaps Molly is truly a song with mixed melodies. She is Carly Simons "Your So Vain" - when she insists that the newspaper notice announcing her birthday is incorrect "I'm 38 - not 40". She is definitely Eric Claptons "Behind the Mask" whose lyrics state "Sit behind the mask where you control your world, Camouflage the truth, indulge your fantasy" - Molly may insist that she is "becoming", but the truth of the matter is that she "becomes" whoever or whatever the situation requires her to be. Molly doesn't connect with people, she merely observes and reacts and ladies and gentlemen that is what is called a talent for "ACTING".

I enjoyed this novel on several levels. First, because it requires that we scrutinize and reflect on certain "truths" regarding love, family, friends, and identity. Through her characters, author Deirdre Madden provides us with an accumulation of quotable insights and ideas such as "even more than our parents, our siblings are the determining factor in our individual fate"; and "we all do get what we really want in life. We make a point of it although sometimes we choose not to own it", or "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". Yep, there's a lot of irony and understanding in this little book.

The author also offers musings concerning the damage suffered by actors. "Acting takes a psychological toll from the actor as each audience member makes their own private connection". Sort of makes one feel like an artistic vampire, metaphorically speaking, for having enjoyed an actor's performance. Poor, poor Brad and Angelina! I feel so guilty.

Suffice to say there is plenty in this little volume to chew on and digest, but be sure to keep your Rolaids handy, because some of it may not go down too easily.

It is no accident that the narrator of Molly Fox's Birthday remains nameless or that the book opens with her dream of "walking through the streets of a strange city, in a foreign country I did not recognize." The theme of the book is identity and it becomes increasingly obvious that the narrator - and her friend Molly Fox - are consistently grappling with who they really are.

Molly Fox, the eponymous character, is an actress who takes over other people's friendships and relationships as easily as she takes over the serious roles she covets. At one point, the narrator recalls Molly stating, "All of my life, and the past year in particular, was like a dream, and what I was watching on the stage, that was my reality, that was my truth...I gradually came to realize something: So that's who I am: I'm an actor." Molly is constantly "becoming, not pretending." And this act of becoming truly defines her.

The narrator, too, is "becoming." She inhabits Molly's home (and by extension, her life) and struggles to complete a play she's writing. And - during Molly's birthday - she reflects on their friendship, their individual relationships with their college friend Andrew and their two elusive brothers, Tom and Fergus.

And gradually, the narrator begins to realize the roles they've all been forced to play. She undergoes an epiphany: "How completely I had bought Molly's version of him (Molly's brother). And even more to the point, how completely I bought Molly's version of herself."

This slim book raises big questions: how to find a life of one's own that's true and right, how to separate one's real life with the roles we undertake, and how to become comfortable within oneself. When the narrator questions, "Is the self really such a fluid thing, something we invest as we go along, almost as a social reflex?", it's obvious that she's onto something. The irony of the title - Molly Fox's Birthday - is that in an important way, this is the rebirth of the narrator herself.