Each of the two novels that I want to discuss in this post has as its central character a young, straight woman whose closest friend is a gay man. The novels have a lot in common, as we’ll see, but they’re quite distinct from each other in tone, style and mood. I enjoyed reading and writing about each author’s immediately preceding novel: Caroline O’Donoghue’s Scenes of a Graphic Nature and Belinda McKeon’s Solace.

O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident (2023) is the first-person narrative of Rachel Murray, who turns 21 in the course of the story and who graduates from University College Cork (UCC) with a degree in Sociology and English. McKeon’s book, Tender (2015) is written in the third person but from the point of view of Catherine Reilly, a first- and second-year student (aged 18 and 19) in Trinity College Dublin (TCD). English is also one of Catherine’s subjects, the other being Art History.

One thing that these novels have in common is that each of the young heroines finds herself in a situation that causes her acute embarrassment. In the pivotal episode of O’Donoghue’s book, Rachel turns up at a dinner-party given by Aideen “Deenie” Harrington and walks unprepared into a crisis. Rachel has been working for €50 a week as the intern/assistant to Deenie, who works in publishing. Deenie has just brought out a collection of responses to the work of her father, a now largely forgotten poet, and she’s holding the party to celebrate the publication.

Deenie’s husband, Dr Fred Byrne, was Rachel’s lecturer in Victorian literature, and it had been at his suggestion that Deenie had taken Rachel on as an intern. Shortly after she had invited Rachel to the party, Deenie discovered evidence that her husband was sleeping with Rachel. She confronted him and he admitted the affair. Not realizing that Rachel had been invited to the party, he didn’t warn her not to come, and she duly turned up, totally unsuspecting, leading to a scene witnessed by the other guests.

There was a good reason why Rachel had not been expecting a confrontation with Deenie. She had not, in fact, been sleeping with Dr Byrne. The lecturer was not having an affair with one of his students — but rather with the student’s best friend, who was not himself a student but a bookshop employee with ambitions to write television comedy. Fred Byrne’s confession to a sexual relationship with Rachel is never explicitly explained, but presumably he didn’t want Deenie to know that his actual lover was a man. Rachel had a reason of her own for going along with the lie.

Despite being unprepared, Rachel recovered quickly. She had recently learned that she was 8 weeks pregnant, having failed to notice (for various reasons including work on Deenie’s publication) that she had missed two periods. She had been desperately trying to pull together enough money to fly to Manchester for a termination. So, she pretended that Dr Byrne was responsible for the pregnancy and cold-bloodedly extorted €2,000 from him and Deenie to pay for the abortion, with a guarantee that they would never hear from her again.

Rachel had thought of Deenie as a friend, and one that she was sorry to lose. The friendship had its complications, of course. First of all, she had at first intended to try to seduce Fred Byrne, even before she had met Deenie. And when she met her, she found that she resented the older woman’s style, self-assurance and small stature:

Deenie kissed him, getting up on her tiptoes to do it, and said she’d see him in the pub. I felt annoyed by the tiptoes, the gauche expression of tiny-ness from her. Teenie Deenie. Fuck you, I thought. I’m going to shag your husband just for that. (p. 56)

But she didn’t get the chance. Dr Byrne turned out to be much more interested in her friend and housemate, James Devlin. So Rachel’s developing friendship with Deenie was compromised from the start by the fact that Rachel knew who Deenie’s husband was sleeping with and, with a high degree of accuracy, how often.

Relationships grow in the cradle they are born in. The cradle of me and Deenie would always be that she was the clueless wife of my best friend’s lover. There was a slice of me that would always condescend to her, no matter how sweet or clever or kind she was. (p. 148)

Rachel met James when she got a part-time job in a bookshop where he already worked. They immediately got on very well together, even though James at first mistook her for a different part-time worker: “he threw his hands up and said straight women all looked the same to him” (p. 7). They were soon renting a house together. The house was cold and damp and they took to sleeping in the same bed (James’s) largely for warmth but also partly for closeness.

This bears some resemblance to the similar living arrangement between Charlie and Laura in the previous novel. Unlike Charlie and Laura, however, Rachel and James didn’t initiate, even tentatively, any kind of inchoate sexual contact, though they did share one long kiss.

The kiss lasted ten seconds. Fifteen tops. I don’t remember how it stopped, or why, but we went back to sleep, untroubled as babies.

We’ve never talked about the kiss. I’ve thought about it, of course. Now that he was out, was kissing a woman the last taboo left? Was he saying goodbye to women, and to the notion of straightness altogether? Was it a strange way of saying thank you for coming with him to Fermoy? The most boring answer is probably the most true one: that he simply wanted to mark the last day where he lived without secrets. (pp. 143–4)

On the basis of this novel and its predecessor, it would seem that one of O’Donoghue’s recurring themes is the way friendships change. Growing up means, to some extent, growing apart. Some friendships will be strong enough to survive that divergence, but not all.

Rachel says that she and James only ever had three fights. The second, and probably the worst, came after the showdown with Deenie and her husband, when Rachel came home with Deenie’s cheque for €2,000 and the news that Dr Byrne had assured his wife that he’d break off the relationship. James had wanted to go around to Fred’s house and blow the whole thing up, but fortunately he didn’t know the address. He tried to phone, but Fred blocked his number.

If James had had acted as he wanted to, Deenie would almost inevitably have discovered that Rachel’s pregnancy had nothing to do with her husband’s straying and would have had every reason to stop the cheque.

James had been prepared to travel to Manchester with Rachel, go with her to the abortion clinic and make sure she was OK. In the end, she didn’t need to go because she lost the pregnancy. She didn’t, of course, give Deenie the money back. The rumour had quickly spread about her supposed affair with Dr Byrne and she was subjected to a variety of reactions from people she didn’t know, ranging from hostility from people who knew Deenie, to curiosity from some female students.

Rachel was unusually tall (hence her resentment of Deenie’s tiptoe manoeuvre), and Fred was just a big man generally. On first seeing him, James had speculated that he must be “hung like a chandelier” (p. 53). One young woman conspiratorially asked Rachel about that very question (“I always wondered …”, p. 248). Rachel didn’t respond to that but ironically she knew the answer, not from her own observation but because James had told her.

Rachel decided that she had to get away from Cork and she and James planned to move to London, using their savings and the money from Deenie. Their third fight happened when James admitted that he had been arranging to move to New York instead, having been offered an internship on a comedy tv show. They agreed to split the money evenly. After their respective departures in different directions, they continued to keep in touch but there were some subjects they never discussed, particularly Dr Fred Byrne. Years afterwards, Rachel was told that Fred was in a coma — as a result, she later learned, of a brain infection caused by an amoeba having got into his ear while he was swimming — but she didn’t tell James about this.

McKeon’s novel is bleaker, it treats its central character more harshly, than O’Donoghue’s. That character, Catherine, is younger and less experienced than Rachel. She too meets a gay man who seems to her exactly what has been missing from her life. He’s like nobody she has met before, and she believes there’s a deep connection between them. Within a day or two of meeting, they’re practically inseparable. As in O’Donogue’s story, the young woman is a student, the man isn’t. He has just come back from Berlin, where he worked as an assistant to a photographer, and where he wasn’t happy. He has recently accepted that he’s gay but is convinced that he’ll never find anyone he’ll be able to love, and who will love him.

After the summer, he goes back to Berlin, intending to stay for another year, but is back within a few months, having found his life there miserable. While he was away, Catherine and he exchanged long letters. Catherine was glad to receive these but, as her social life got busier in her second year at college, she didn’t always read them attentively.

As I’ve suggested, there are notable resemblances as well as significant differences between the two novels. In each, the central character’s best friend is named James. (O’Donoghue’s has an extra James, who becomes significant.) I’ve already mentioned the fact that both protagonists suffer acute embarrassment. In Catherine’s case, the awkward occasions are more plentiful and, till the big one, less serious. For example, at a party given by a prominent novelist (whom she has interviewed for Trinity News) where everyone is expected to sing, she begins to sing a song in Irish only to realize that she doesn’t know the words. She makes up Irish-sounding nonsense, thinking no one will know the difference, but several people do.

She and James sometimes share a bed, not as frequently as Rachel and the other James. Unlike Rachel and James, they do actually have sex. The first time is after the party where Catherine sang the mock-Irish song. At that party, James has snogged Nate, a New York gallery-owner who is the partner of a distinguished photographer, born in Belfast but long resident in New York. Catherine believes that James is having sex with her because he needs — has been deprived of — physical touch.

As they continue to sleep together, Catherine becomes somewhat fixated on James and, when he finally meets a man he likes, she tries to drive the man away by telling him that James still sleeps with her regularly, though this is not true. Catherine’s flatmates, who are also James’s friends from school, overhear his confrontation with her over this. As a result, Catherine is sent to Coventry — though she actually goes to London, transferring to Goldsmiths for the final year of her degree. In both books, then, the protagonist takes refuge in London, fleeing a humiliating scandal at home.

In each book, the female central character ends up living in London, her male friend in New York. And in each case there’s an epilogue, an episode that takes place years after the main narrative. And each epilogue features a partial reconciliation.

Rachel is more or less reconciled with Deenie, who has come to understand that Rachel couldn’t possibly be the person whom Fred was having an affair with, but she still wants to know why he was regularly sending Tesco deliveries to her house. Rachel doesn’t feel that she can tell her — it’s not her story — but she gives Deenie the email address of her best friend, who now lives in New York, a comedy writer named James Devlin.

The reconciliation in Tender takes place in New York, some fourteen years later. James is a successful photographer, married to a man who hasn’t featured earlier in the story and the owner of an expensive apartment in Brooklyn. Catherine is an assistant editor at an upmarket art magazine, in the city to chair a critics’ discussion at an art fair. They meet, and she is reassured that she hadn’t been deluded about the intensity of their friendship all those years earlier. When they part, they don’t talk about staying in touch, nor do they make any further arrangement, but they know how to reach each other.

The Rachel Incident was published in 2023 and is set in 2009–10, with the epilogue in 2022, while Tender came out in 2015 and is set in 1997–8, the events of the epilogue happening in 2012. The party at which Catherine sang and James snogged Nate took place as the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement were coming to a conclusion, and the Omagh bombing later that same year plays a significant part in the story.

Because the story of Rachel and James takes place in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, while Ireland was being subjected to a strict regime of “austerity” by the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the IMF, the atmosphere feels very much like the 1980s, and I had to keep reminding myself that these events were to be imagined as taking place much later.

In an interview with Hot Press, Belinda McKeon describes Catherine as “a narcissist” who “wants to take more than she is willing to give”, and suggests that her behaviour towards James results from “inherited, unthinking homophobia”. That’s not how Catherine had appeared to me and I was a little taken aback to find McKeon being so harsh towards her protagonist. I thought that because of her youth and inexperience, she had been overwhelmed by the intensity of a friendship of a kind she hadn’t encountered before, and partly misunderstood its nature. In any case, both of these novels seem to me to be primarily about friendship.

Editions: The Rachel Incident, Virago paperback, 2024; Tender, Picador paperback, 2016.