Book Review: Evenings and Weekends, Oisín McKenna

There are a lot of things a novel can be: entertainment, a glimpse into another mind, a slice of life, a summary of an age. A great novel is everything. Middlemarch is entertaining, a period to early Victorian England, and above all a great moral experiment. n extended what if applied to life as it’s lived. There’s a reason novels are populated by characters, and that characters are things resembling people. We want to know what it would be like to live differently, what it could be like to live differently. How would it feel? How do we transform? How should one live? According to conscience, George Elliot answers.

What’s happening with the ‘gay novel’/‘queer novel’? Gay novels have moved out of the exclusively literary, out of the ghetto where gay people’s lives were taken seriously, and into mainstream genres. There are gay horrors (Gabriel Smith’s Brat), and gay thrillers (P. J. Vernon’s Bath Haus), and gay romance (Heartstopper).. As gays have found wider social acceptance, they have also become a stock character for genre. All the tropes of genre can now apply to gays as well. Equality is a hell of a thing.

This is good: it’s nice to see that lgbtq+ characters are ‘normal’ (for want of a better word). But also it has its downsides: characters are stock characters. And the genuine struggles of gay people get reduced to the machinery of plot. So their lives come with solutions: get married, stay monogamous, buy a house, adopt kids. This exerts a subtle pressure on gay people to be and act in ways which are a little inimical to their flourishing. The requirements of plot make the stories feel too ‘pat,’ too nice. The addict comes clean, the ghost is gay and you learn to love it.

And in terms of ‘how to live?’ Even self-consciously queer novels can feel a little rubbish. underbaked and under-thought out. It’s no wonder that trans novels are where it’s at now, literary speaking.

Take Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna as an example. The plot follows a cast of characters from the trendy East and South (Kingsland Road, London Fields, the Hampstead ponds, Dalston Supermarket) over a single weekend in June, a weekend so hot that the city heaves with unfulfilled lust. Maggie is pregnant, preparing to give up her London life for suburban bliss with her boyfriend, Ed, a cycle courier with asthma and a secret. Her best friend, Phil, is in love with his housemate, Keith, but he’s just a sideshow in Keith’s open relationship with Louie. Callum, Phil’s brother, is getting married, but he’s a drug dealer prone to benders, and he’s upset about his mum, Rosaleen. Meanwhile, Rosaleen is trying to tell Phil about her cancer diagnosis. Everybody is trying to find love, or get high, get fucked, or, at the very least, just talk to each other, truthfully, honestly, for five minutes.

The prose is lovely. It’s rhythmic and sensory, and you feel, reading it, that the writer was there, he got the vibe and, like a lepidopterist, netted it and pinned it in a cabinet. The cast is kaleidoscopic, and the novel genuinely gets under the character’s skins. You do feel the mutual incomprehension of a 60 year old call centre worker from Basildon and her gay, university educated son; and you feel the love. You get the anxiety that a cycle courier feels when confronted with a surprise pregnancy; how will he provide for his baby, when he can barely provide for himself? The novel has a lot going for it, it’s just that it feels like the writer could have spent longer at the drawing board.

The main gay character, Phil, is in love with Keith, who’s already in a relationship. Phil and Keithnever really discuss this, save for one single constipated attempt late towards the end of the novel. Then Phil joins Keith and Louis as part of a budding Throuple. Simple. It just feels…too easy. There’s no real conflict in the story, there’s no real locus of moral education, or moral discussion. Louis doesn’t really get a look in: we only meet him for one two page section, where he decides to enjoy the benefits of a more open relationship. In the end Louis seems to straightforwardly accept that his boyfriend is going to have a boyfriend (despite the two of them moving down to Folkestone and living in a house together!) This all happens in the space of about five pages, where it could have been the subject of a novel in itself.

Or take Phil’s mum, Rosaleen. She has cancer, and travels to London to tell Phil (who is the last person in the family, the last person from their entire council estate, to know). But when the conversation comes up, she can’t tell him. The book is at pains to give us a complete outline of Rosaleen’s childhood in Ireland and her courtship with Steve and how, exactly, she feels about Phil in general. But in the particular moment where words fail her: nothing. In the end Rosaleen finally returns to Ireland to pay her respects to her friend (and possible first queer crush) Pauline, who was also crushed by the weight of her own circumstances.

The emotional problems of the characters get solved by the events of the plot. Phil gets over the Trauma of sexual assault by getting fucked by his boyfriend in a darkroom. Ed and Maggie split up once Maggie realises she can’t let Ed sacrifice his happiness for her sake. (The baby? Aborted). There’s nothing grown up about the stories. Nobody is ever punished for doing the right thing, nor are they rewarded for betraying their conscience but advancing their agendas. There are no Dorotheas or Lydgate’s in this novel. There are also no Annas or Kittys, Levins or Karenins. Keith isn’t dashing and virile enough to justify Phil’s attention, nor does Callum and Holly’s relationship provide any (moral) foil to Ed and Maggie’s.

The novel starts with a beached whale, hopeless and stuck through a series of unfortunate events. It’s lifted onto a barge, and, in one memorable psychedelic sequence, taken down the river past a hen party Maggie is attending. It reaches the Thames Estuary, but the humans’ attempts to save it are in vain: eventually the whale is crushed by its own weight. This feels like an apt description of all the characters in the novel. They are denied agency in their lives, crushed by the accumulated weight of their circumstances and their pasts. They are denied the ability to act to make their situations better, or to make their situation worse. They simply are. The world is like weather, and at the end of the novel they are left with things sort of neatly wrapped up, but also not, and there’s nothing they could have done otherwise