Academy Street
Mary Costello, 2014 (U.S., 2015)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
150 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250081674
Summary
Tess Lohan is the kind of woman we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely―a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with.
Academy Street is Mary Costello’s luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile.
The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force: It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy, capturing, in sentence after sentence, the rhythm and intensity of inner life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Galway, Ireland
• Education—B.A., St. Patrick's College, Dublin
• Awards—Bord Gais Irish Book of the Year Award
• Currently—lives in Dublin
Mary Costello is originally from Galway but lives in Dublin. Her stories have been published in New Irish Writing, The Stinging Fly and in several anthologies including Town and Country – New Irish Short Stories.
She taught for many years and is now writing fulltime. Her first book, a collection of short stories entitled The China Factory, was published in 2012 and was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and the Irish Books Award. Stories from the collection were broadcast on RTE and BBC radio.
Academy Street, Costello's first novel, came out in 2014 (U.S., 2015). It won the Bord Gais Irish Book of the Year Award and was a finalist for the Costa First Novel Award, the International Dublin Literary Ward, and the EU Prize for Literature. In 2011 and 2013, she received an Arts Council bursary. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
To have spent a couple of days luxuriating in the shimmering prose of Academy Street was like heaven for me. Though at times Tess Lohan is quiet as a mouse, motherless from an early age, living in fear of her moody, sorrowful father’s wrath, her inner life, even as a child, is rich. READ MORE.
Keddy Ann Outlaw - LitLovers
Costello's concern, in this slim novel traversing seven decades, is to bear witness to the intensity of experience that Tess knows from the inside out…the writing becomes charged with all the strangeness and vitality of her character.
Belinda McKeon - New York Times Book Review
[Costello] has a gift for relating even life's most calamitous events in matter-of-fact prose, and in doing so laying bare their true devastation.… Costello is also a master of storytelling shorthand. She understands that what makes a milestone memorable is not its central ceremony but what happens on the margins.
Maria Crawford - Financial Times
Mary Costello is a very gifted writer and this is a beautifully written novel.
Neil Donnelly - Irish Independent
A remarkable debut with a transcendent, quiet power.
Judges - 2014 Costa First Novel Award
Costello works wonders on the page, employing precise prose to craft a resonant narrative out of a rather ordinary lifetime. Though a fateful incident near the novel’s end feels somewhat exploitative…Tess’s overall story—full of struggles and meekness—proves there is often beauty to be found in the mundane.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Darkly beautiful…. [Recalls] Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.… Costello renders her homely, knowing heroine with craft and compassion in this sad, slim, rich novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Memory plays an important role in Academy Street, and near the beginning of the novel, Tess takes a walk through the grounds of her family’s estate and picks up a rotting apple. The smell takes her back to "the apple room and the apples laid out on newspapers on the floor, turning yellow." Why is memory such an important theme in the novel, and what is it about scent that can bring one back to precise memories?
2. Shortly after the death of her mother, Tess has several interactions with a "tinker girl." What is the significance of this girl and her exchanges with Tess? Why do you think the author included this character?
3. While Tess is mourning her mother, she seeks comfort from Captain, the family dog. Tess feels that "he understands something about her, maybe everything, and her heart begins to open." Why do you think Tess seems to experience more comfort from a dog than one of her family members? And what does it say about Tess’s character that she feels this way? Have you ever had a similar experience with an animal?
4. Shortly before Tess leaves for New York, she finds herself in the kitchen with her father. She offers to cut his hair, and she says that it is in this moment that "she sees for the first time all he has endured." What does this dramatic scene represent for each character?
5. On the day Tess meets David for the first time, she reads a book about Vincent Van Gogh and is moved by the kindness of his brother, Theo. When she is walking down the street to meet her friends she begins to cry for no apparent reason. After, she feels as if she sees things clearly and sees "beauty everywhere." What do you make of this transformation and its significance to the novel?
6. Soon after Tess begins to fall in love with David, she runs into a bag lady on the street "with crazed eyes" and "wild hair" who shouts obscenities at Tess. This incident "shook her to her core." What is it about this particular incident that unsettles Tess so deeply?
7. Was Tess’s decision to sleep with David out of character? Why or why not?
8. When Tess becomes pregnant with Theo, it is the early 1960s and it is not socially acceptable for a woman to be pregnant out of wedlock. Tess describes how she takes to wearing a wedding ring and seats herself near "earnest-looking" men. What would you have done in Tess’s position? And while times have certainly changed, do you think it is truly socially acceptable for single women to have children in our times?
9. Why does Tess have such a hard time writing a reply to the letter Claire sends her after Claire finds out Tess is pregnant?
10. Do you think Tess should have made more of an effort to involve David in Theo’s life after he was born?
11. Tess meets Boris, the older Russian man from the park, for a second time when he is hospitalized. He tells her "There is, in some of us, an essential loneliness.… It is in you." Do you agree with his assessment of Tess? Why or why not?
12. When Theo is about nine or ten, Tess takes him to a friend’s birthday party, and he does not want to leave. Tess is struck by the feeling that he now feels that he’s been denied certain things, and we learn that she never baked Theo a birthday cake and did not take him to the fun places that other children are often taken. Why does Tess deny her son these experiences? Does this make her selfish?
13. Tess and Wilma have a very close relationship, and once, when they are discussing Greek mythology, Tess finds herself sexually attracted to Wilma. Why would the author include this scene, and what does it reflect about the two’s relationship?
14. When Tess learns that the twin towers were hit by planes and Theo was inside, she describes the moment as "the calamity she had always been waiting for. It was almost a relief when it arrived…" Why does Tess feel this way? Do you think it’s an unusual response?
15. Shortly after Theo’s death, Tess presses her fingers into the throat of her cat’s neck until the cat becomes frightened and runs away. What does this scene tells us about the nature of grief?
(Questions written by Kianoosh Hashemzadeh and issued by the publisher.)
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