Intimations of a Story

Keith Ridgway, a brilliant but little-known Irish novelist, writes detective fiction in the sense that Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Lethem, and Colson Whitehead have written detective fiction. His second novel, The Parts (2004), is a sprawling mystery thriller; his fourth novel, Hawthorn & Child (2013), revises the police procedural; and his fifth, A Shock (2021), tracks missing persons and mistaken identities. In all his works, Ridgway evokes the shifting, unstable, patched-together stories that we tell ourselves to give our lives some kind of coherence. His characters struggle to accomplish what classic detectives like Dupin or Holmes perform so easily: constructing a convincing narrative out of senseless crimes and contradictory clues.

Hawthorn & Child is haunted by efforts to assemble such a story. The novel is filtered through a dense, granular, somewhat myopic narration reminiscent of Gertrude Stein, especially her own literary mystery, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948). Ridgway employs interior monologues to convey characters’ fragmented perceptions as they try to figure out, often quite literally, where they are and what has happened. The opening paragraphs of Hawthorn & Child, for example, don’t clearly identify either the center of consciousness (which turns out to be Hawthorn, one of the detectives named in the title) or the situation. Each sentence veers in a slightly different direction. In a Page Turner interview, Ridgway remarked that he doesn’t revise much but instead “just write[s] incredibly slowly, worrying over it one sentence at a time.” Readers may find themselves pondering his deceptively simple sentences with similar absorption:

He dreamed he was sleeping, and Child was driving. Driving but not moving. He was sleeping on the passenger seat and Child wrestled with the wheel, but the car was still. It was the city that was moving. It was dark. The city rushed past them like words on a screen, and he would have read them but they went too fast. He was filled with sorrow. It trickled through him and filled his eyes. He wept and he didn’t know why, and he was embarrassed by it but he could not stop. He cried so much that his face disappeared. He dreamed that the siren was on, and it was so loud that it woke him.

He awoke. Child was driving. The city was still and they rushed through it. That was the difference. A finger across a page, taking corners not turning them, hopping little hills, drawing zigzag ciphers on the wide, empty intersections.

The rate at which one reads becomes a metaphor for the experience being described. In Hawthorn’s dream, the city races by like words on a movie or television screen, too fast to be understood; after he awakes, driving down streets instead resembles following a finger across a page. Subsequent references to notepads, notebooks, typescripts, and “paperwork” further emphasize the textual aspects of detection. The notebook where Hawthorn records their investigations is among the few elements connecting the novel’s disparate parts, yet Child grumbles, “You keep the worst notes ever. And because you write things down you think you’ve understood them. And remembered them. You’ve just scribbled some random fucking words.” Indeed, Hawthorn’s jottings resemble drafts of poems: “Marine …… pools of light/pools of shadow.” In the second chapter, he takes notes on meetings with his confidential informant, an innocent young man who works as chauffeur for a shadowy underworld figure named Mishazzo. Here, Hawthorn’s notebook is mirrored by another — recalling the multiplying red notebooks of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy — where the informant and his girlfriend secretly write things they are too shy to tell each other aloud. And in the fourth chapter, as things grow increasingly surreal, Hawthorn scrawls feverishly “in his little book” while he and Child interview a book editor (who keeps to himself his memories of murdering teenaged runaways and prostitutes) about a mysterious memoir he received, supposedly composed by the prince...