Aoibheann Sweeney's First Novel
Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking
Sweeney's first novel is a talented but flawed coming of age story.
Aoibheann Sweeney sure knows how to draw a reader in. Her debut novel, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, takes its title from the book’s first provocative sentence. The second sentence sweeps readers right into the heart of the story, revealing a character named Ana, a tension between the narrator’s good girl/bad girl identities and the similar isolation of a city and a remote island, all without explanation of how these elements relate. Quite a compelling set of ingredients. The following paragraph seamlessly shifts to Miranda’s (the narrator’s) childhood on the island in Maine, letting those first sentences echo in the reader’s mind as a promise of what is to come.
Does Sweeney fulfill that promise? Yes and no. In some ways, she fulfills it when certain elements mentioned in the second sentence come into play during the second half of the book. But before then, she has to fill in a lot of back-story.
In the first half of the book we get to know the young Miranda, an introverted only child who lives with her father on Crab Island. Her father inherited the property from his old business partner, Arthur, with whom he had established an institute for classical learning in Manhattan many years ago. Miranda’s mother “disappeared into the fog and didn’t come back” when Miranda was very young and a part-Native American fisherman, Mr. Blackwell, takes on the work of raising Miranda while her father obsesses over his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Her father neglects preparation for Miranda’s future while she makes few friends in school, loses her virginity to a sailor and misses her college exams. The summer after her high school graduation, her father sends Miranda to live and work with his old friends in New York.
Elements that are mentioned in the novel’s first paragraph are brought in during the second and third parts. Miranda moves in with a gay couple who divulge that her father and Arthur were lovers. She begins a relationship with Nate, a kind, handsome grad student who works for her father’s friends, but she is simultaneously drawn to the Latina transsexual, Ana, at the local coffee stand. Eventually she leaves Nate for Ana and takes her new girlfriend back to Maine to meet her father. Miranda confronts her father about his past and tells him that she loves him.
Though Sweeny includes all the elements that were mentioned in the novel’s first paragraph, she fails to fulfill the promise by never returning to the voice that opened the story. The entire book is in the past tense but the opening is in the present, for no apparent reason other than to be catchy. Also, the opening brings up problems that are never addressed. If Miranda has come to terms with herself and her father, why is this future Miranda tormented by playing good girl/bad girl? Why is she drinking, when alcohol is a marker of unhappiness throughout the book? And although it is important enough to make the title, we never do discover why Miranda has taken up smoking.
Aoibheann Sweeney sure knows how to draw a reader in. She also knows how to write beautifully understated prose, how to build suspense and how to create characters that are worth caring about. She does not yet know how to structure a book so that it is seamless, so that readers won’t question the reality she has created for her characters. Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking is an imperfect novel, but it is evidence of a promising new writer who still has a lot to learn.
Sweeney, Aoibheann. Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking. New York: Penguin Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-59420-130-1. US $23.95, Canada $30.00.
