One Punch Later and Belfast Pulls Him Back

CLOSE TO HOME, by Michael Magee

Though the voice is decidedly Irish, the message of Michael Magee’s dead-on debut novel is universal. At its core, “Close to Home” is about finding a way to transcend the pain, the people and the place you’re born into.

The year is 2013, and Sean Maguire has just returned home to Belfast after earning an English degree in Liverpool. The Troubles are a thing of the past, but the city and its citizens remain scarred by the decades-long political conflict. In the novel’s opening paragraph, Sean assaults a stranger at a party: “There was nothing to it. I swung and hit him and he dropped.” That one punch sends Sean’s life spiraling, closer and closer to the world he’s worked so hard to escape.

Some of the novel’s most visceral scenes center on Sean’s family. His mother is a maid who’s spent 15 years “cleaning other people’s mansions for six quid an hour.” She’s also a painter who loves her three boys, even Sean’s hard-partying big brother Anthony.

Anthony, or Anto, is the book’s most complicated character, just as likely to kiss Sean on the cheek as punch him in the nose. Anto is a painter by trade, but unlike his mother’s, there’s no art to his work. He often winds up at the local pub —“usually after a long week on the job,” Magee writes, “when the fumes from the paint he had been inhaling since he was a teenager began to prickle his itchy skin. And that was it.”

When Anto goes “on the rip” it’s often for weeklong, epic episodes, and though Sean isn’t that far gone, he’s getting close, especially when pressures mount after the assault.

Many of the book’s early chapters follow Sean through a series of heavy binges, followed by late-night McDonald’s runs. Though the drinking and drug-taking all feel real, it’s what comes after that rings most true — the raw black guilt that rises with the morning sun. “I closed my eyes and heard his voice as if from the other end of a tunnel,” Magee writes. “The tunnel was long and dark. I felt like I was being pulled through.”

Sean feels the same pull as he endures his community service sentence, which begins in a graveyard, on “poor ground” where over 200,000 people are buried “and not one of them has a name. They lost their names because they couldn’t afford to buy their own plots.”

By presenting dialogue without quotation marks and employing single-line, staccato paragraphs, Magee’s yarn unspools like a story told over a couple of pints. The result is an intimate, dizzying onslaught that highlights the contrast between fear and joy, love and hate.

“I’ve always been more of a da than a brother,” Anto says to Sean near the book’s conclusion, a bittersweet line that perfectly encapsulates how family bonds ensnare both men.

Sweet because it’s true; Anto does love his little brother. Bitter because Anto already has children of his own, and the scars he’s leaving on them are obvious, if understated.

The novel isn’t without hope, though. From Sean’s ma’s paintbrushes to an inscription on the title page of a secondhand book, beauty abounds in the negative spaces, emerging against all odds, much like “The Rose That Grew From Concrete,” the title of a poem by Tupac Shakur, one of Sean’s favorite artists.

“Close to Home” is a dark but illuminating portrait of Belfast, painted by a man who knows the lads, the bars, the bookstores and back alleys that litter his birthplace. Some may read the book in relation to other Irish coming-of-age stories, but to me, this poignant, no-frills work brings to mind the late Mississippi writer Larry Brown — another author who wrote about home and believed that art could save it.

Eli Cranor is the Edgar Award-winning author of “Don’t Know Tough” and the recently published “Ozark Dogs.”

CLOSE TO HOME | By Michael Magee | 288 pp. | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | $28.