The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

Editorial Assistant Book Club: September 2023

An odd thing about publishing is that one book or author can make a trend.  That’s certainly true of Sally Rooney, the 32-year-old Irish novelist, who took the (literary) world by storm with her spare, intimate, and interior novels about relationships. Rooney became such an avatar for a certain kind of reader that by the time her third novel was set to come out in 2021, early copies of the book were selling for hundreds of dollars and there was steep competition for the now infamous Sally Rooney bucket hat. The upshot of Rooney’s popularity created not only a bigger readership for literary novels about women in early adulthood but a publishing industry willing to seek them out. That means a lot more books that would have once been considered “quiet”—and also, in a more parochial publishing way just any novel by Irish, English, and Australian women in their 20s and 30s—became suddenly not just viable but sought after. Rooney blazed a path through for editors and booksellers to say the magic words “this is the next Sally Rooney.”

Enter Caroline O’Donoghue author of two YA novels and two other adult novels, who despite some success elsewhere in the world is publishing an adult novel for the first time in the US with The Rachel Incident. While Sally Rooney paved the way in a general sense for Irish literary exports, also notable to the question of “why now?” is O’Donoghue’s connection to writer Dolly Alderton, an English writer, whose Everything I Know About Love and Ghosts were stealth hits that established her in the literary world with the same kind of Rooney reader. O’Donoghue and Alderton host a podcast Sentimental in the City (about Sex in the City), and now share the same US publisher for their novels.

The Rachel Incident is certainly for the readers of Rooney or Alderton despite sharing little stylistically or structurally with either novelist, the former being far more serious and the latter being more cynical and humorous. While in contrast to her contemporaries O’Donoghue is a more sentimental and sincere novelist. The Rachel Incident is narrated by the protagonist (yes, you guessed it, Rachel) from the future, telling the story of the year that changed her life during her last year of college and the months right after in Cork. Rachel works with her gay best friend James in a bookstore and they live in the conditions that many in their early 20s do—shoddily, spending what little money they have going out and getting drunk (or staying in and getting drunk). The novel is set into motion by Rachel’s obsession with her married older English professor, Dr. Fred Byrne as she rounds her final year at school. You might guess where the story goes from there, but it is not always in ways that you might expect.

Spot the pattern?

Slow Burn

It was hard at first to pinpoint exactly what makes The Rachel Incident such a satisfying and compelling novel, because there’s not one obvious strength that stands out in the early going—humor, plot, psychological observation, setting, etc. That’s not an insult to O’Donoghue, because The Rachel Incident isn’t exactly weak in any of these areas either. It’s a good literary novel that has recognizable literary novel elements on the surface—strong sentences, clever dialogue, a bookstore. The Rachel Incident uses two of the most time-honored plot devices in all of literary fiction as its backbone. The novel feints at being about an affair, but the hiding, secret keeping and powder keg of adultery this device usually serves for is not what the book fixates on, thankfully. And there’s another classic literary plot device that I won’t spoil here, and it was with this incident where all of the careful groundwork laid in the first half of the novel clicked into place and the novel found another gear. What was certainly average or above average morphed over the course of the book, and The Rachel Incident emerged as that rare shape of a slow-burn novel.  The book’s true exceptionality also became apparent as the story built and built, which is clearly O’Donoghue’s mastery of character.

How To Build Characters

There are two main ways good characterization works. The first way, the one that probably comes to the top of mind for most readers, is characters that have strong traits—characters that act in a particularly defined and memorable way (think Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley or Mrs. Trunchbull in Matilda). Think of the way novelists sometimes talk about knowing exactly what a particular character of theirs would do in any given situation. The second way of building strong characters is by giving the reader a sense of growing familiarity that happens while watching a character go through many varied experiences. They may not change, but our understanding of them does. To use two classic novels as examples, both on the extreme ends of these two techniques of building good characters, To Kill a Mockingbird favors the strong trait type of character building—precocious child, unshakable lawyer—while The Great Gatsby favors the latter, letting characters—primarily Gatsby and Nick—be more malleable and open-ended. With either method you can still end up with good characters.

The Rachel Incident succeeds using both methods. Dr. Fred Byrne, Rachel’s professor, and his equally pretentious wife Deenie, as well as Rachel’s charming, but unreliable boyfriend Carey, are all stellar examples of the traditional, first method of character building. Their role is to show up and be exactly who they are. This kind of good character keeps things interesting—when nothing much is happening in the plot, they charm, infuriate, and amuse you. But in the end, it is Rachel and her best friend James, great characters because of the familiarity we gain over time, that make The Rachel Incident a novel that comes together in a powerful way. If Fred, Deenie, and Carey are the rocks then Rachel and James are the waters that flow around them. We watch Rachel and James grow and forge their personalities through the joys and indignities of early adulthood. Our affection for them grows. Which is at the core of why this novel gets better and better. At a certain point, you start living alongside Rachel and James as they go through their trials, feeling their ups and downs. O’Donoghue also writes with an incredible sincerity such that none of this growing kindship with Rachel or James feels like manipulation, but at its peak like a good literary novel should, just like you are witnessing life unfold.

In short read The Rachel Incident if you haven’t already, and stick with it—and let’s make the Rooney, Alderton, and now O’Donoghue, trend continue for many years to come.