Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce by Nuala O’Connor (review)

When I opened Nuala O’Connor’s Nora: A Love Story of Nora and James Joyce, I expected a biographical work. But the first segment stunned me with its vivid sexual description of their first date: “So I unbutton him, put my hand into his drawers, and wrap cool fingers around his heat. A gasp. I work him slow, slow, fast until he’s pleasured, until my fist is warm and wet from him” (2). And as the story continues, with a first-person narration about Nora Barnacle’s relationship with James Joyce, it becomes clear that this is a fictional work, a novel, a biographical novel,¹ as some reviewers call it. Just to verify the potential accuracy of this version of Nora’s first date with Joyce, I checked Brenda Maddox’s 1988 Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce, and although Maddox does not provide actual evidence, she reports a similar experience: “To Joyce’s grateful astonishment, she unbuttoned his trousers, slipped in her hand, pushed his shirt aside, and, acting with some skill (according to his later account), made him a man.”² At this point, I relaxed, and read the work straight through, planning to continue to check questionable descriptions later. And, I must confess, I found it a pleasure.

What makes it such a pleasure? A (fictional) Nora is speaking, telling someone (us) about her life with Joyce, beginning on that first day and continuing for over 450 pages and over a period of forty-seven years until the moment of her own death in 1951. She speaks always in the present, in her own way of talking, giving us hints about her situation, her surroundings, her feelings and temperament, and her values. We experience her not from the outside but entirely from the inside. And, in the process, we also get a complicated picture of her friend and partner and later husband, Jim. Yes, he is James Joyce, but not so much the famous writer as a husband and family man, who is funny and complicated in his own way, a heavy drinker at times, but still a responsible spouse and father who cares for and worries about his family. To Nora, Joyce is “Jim,” a name Joyce generally did not condone, but accepted from his wife.

Hearing this love story of Nora and Joyce in Nora’s own (if fictional) words, is a delight because she sounds so ordinary and natural. Fictional Joyce gives her just this tribute a month after they have met, on 16 July 1904. “‘Nora,’ Jim says, ‘you are syllable, word, sentence, phrase, paragraph, and page. You’re fat vowels and shushing sibilants” (5). Yes, she reports what he says and the way he says it, and when she speaks, she speaks in her own personal style. When she and Jim arrive in Paris on their first 1906 trip, she says, “We haul the trunk and suitcase to a park near the station and I flop onto a bench, clenched all over, and hungry and fagged from traveling. My courses, too, have me low; my bleed has begun, it feels, to spite me and make me tireder yet” (30). She clearly has no hesitation to give her thoughts in all their intimacy. A month later, in Pola, we get another intimate outburst. Nora has been not been feeling great, “My innards were bad and I felt altogether out of sorts,” she tells us, and the smell of pesto makes her retch. Joyce figures out what is wrong with her before she does and hints at it, but she doesn’t get it (55). “For the love of Lucifer, girl, you’re pregnant!” he finally bursts out—and now she understands: “Oh Jesus, oh God, oh Mother Mary. I don’t want him to be right, but sure as shit stinks, he is right” (56). Not the most romantic moment for a couple to...