Barring the many pages of bravura lyricism, O’Callaghan’s non-fiction novel is marred by its lack of coherence. Three lightly fictionalised narratives of family history do not a novel make; it is not enough to write them beautifully and set them side by side without any overarching narrative impetus or direction. O’Callaghan makes clear that to be impoverished, in poor health and without social power is a life sentence that cannot be dodged, and that only cross-generational effort can affect a slow-moving upward trajectory. To the reader this message hits home early. The problem is that the quiet movements of ordinary lives, devoid of the incident and detailed weave of well-crafted fiction, provide little reason to turn the page.
The strength of Life Sentences lies in its long range but intimate style. It’s a thoughtful, slow-motion novel, an antidote to the tics and quips of some millennial fiction. With no single plot culmination, the linked stories have a pleasant, rolling circularity: a reader could profitably finish the book and go straight back to its beginning, like Finnegans Wake, to revisit the family in a renewed and sharper — if not happier — light.
