So complete is our narrator’s rejection of her surroundings that she sticks to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature: “I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century.” You can’t really blame her, though. There’s “first brother-in-law,” a rumor-spreading creep “third sister,” who seems to spend most of her time getting sloshed with her girlfriends “maybe-boyfriend,” with whom the narrator enjoys a wary intimacy “ma,” who is Ma and therefore won’t stop nagging her about getting married and producing babies and the narrator herself, called “middle sister.”
The characters go nameless, identified only by their relationships to one another. Like so many such insular, embattled enclaves, her “area,” as she often refers to it, is suffocating and inescapable. Yet the conflict that most preoccupies this novel flares not between republicans and loyalists or between Catholics and Protestants-Burns, who grew up in North Belfast, uses vague aliases like “renouncers” and “the opposite religion” to take the edge off the novel’s historical specificity-but between the girl and her community. “Milkman”-told in an unspooling, digressive, and fretfully ruminative manner that bears a rough semblance to stream of consciousness but is much easier to follow-is set in an urban war zone where carrying around plastic explosives seems less aberrant than using the sidewalk as a study. The deplorable conduct in question consists of reading books while walking down the street. Calls attention to itself and why-with enemies at the door, with the community under siege, with all of us having to pull together-would anyone want to call attention to themselves here?” She must stop it, and she must stop it now.
The narrator has alienated their neighbors in an equally unnamed, obviously Northern Irish city sometime in the late nineteen-seventies, with the Troubles in full fury. The best friend of the unnamed narrator of Anna Burns’s third novel, “ Milkman” (Graywolf), the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, sits her down in a night club to address some behavior.
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