Reviewed by Travis McDonald

After the publication of 2013's Hawthorn & Child, Irish author Keith Ridgway thought that he was done with writing for good. In an interview with the Irish Times earlier this year, the fifty-five-year-old winner of the esteemed Rooney Prize claimed that for nine years he was "completely content with the idea that [he] would not write again" and told his publishers as much, disappointing many admirers of his distinct fiction. Luckily, Ridgway found his way back to literature, apparently by immersing himself in Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret novels, and New Directions has decided to publish his first work since this artistic hiatus, A Shock, which debuted in July.

This book is not a novel, at least not in the conventional sense of the word, nor is it a short story collection. The back cover describes it as a "rondel of interlocking stories," and this description seems apt because of the way that characters, settings, and images repeat throughout the book, sometimes focusing on a periphery character from a previous section or introducing a new character who will pop up briefly in a later chapter. Though some readers might label this work as a "novel in stories" like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried or Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, the overall effect of the nine chapters of this book, which come full circle in the final section, is much less cohesive and much more elliptical than those works. This is an idiosyncratic furrow of the genre that Ridgway has been plowing for many years.

Both his 2003 book The Parts and the aforementioned Hawthorn & Child take a similar tack, interweaving seemingly discreet stories about characters who are joined, at first, only by their proximity to each other into a larger narrative that both alludes to and resists the traditional structuring of a novel. In Hawthorn & Child, for example, the titular characters are detectives who are investigating a drive-by shooting, which one would imagine is the central plot of the book. However, Ridgway quickly moves us from their story into the stories of various criminals, associates of criminals, and everyday citizens who populate this part of north London.

In A Shock, we're invited into the world of London down-and-outers, though this time in the south-east part of the city near Camberwell and Peckham, as they go about their daily lives: visiting the local pub, indulging in copious amounts of hard drugs, moving into a new apartment, working their unfulfilling jobs, and attending a birthday party. Though it could be argued that each chapter, or story, has a main character, most of the sections revolve around two characters and their relationship with one another. In "The Camera," a white man is confronted by his Black friend for his racist tendencies. Two chapters later, in "The Joke," the white man's wife, Maria, makes friends with a coworker who was recently fired from their school for assigning her students a project about political assassinations. Then in the following chapter, "The Story," the narrative centers on this coworker, Anna Grant, as she sits in the pub where much of the "The Camera" takes place making up stories about her life with a mysterious man known as the Stoker.

This patterning continues throughout the book but only rarely feels overly mannered or managed because of the fine brushstrokes that Ridgway applies to connect the subjects. Characters flit in and out of stories, hang around in the background, are mentioned in passing by other characters, or start a dialogue before we even realize who they are. At times, the author is more explicit about various characters' connections to each other, like in the final story, "The Song," where a nameless character appears and Ridgway writes, "This is David. You know David. From the flat," referring to the main character of the sixth story in the book, "The Flat." Here, the reader can't help but want to stop the narrative and assure Ridgway that we get it; there's no reason to explain this to us.

But these intrusions are so infrequent that they pale in comparison to the overall vision, deftly controlled prose, and pathos that Ridgway generates in each chapter. The opening story centers on an elderly widow whose neighbors are throwing a birthday party and her ruminations and fascinations about what might be happening on the other side of the wall. Close to the middle of the story, Ridgway writes, "What's wrong with her? Why is she sitting miserably in the gloom in her own house, just because next door is having a party? Yes it's loud, but parties are loud. She has made plenty of noise in her time. It will not last forever. It will, in a few hours be over. This is not hell." This passage points to  the central themes of the book: alienation, social anxiety, and the desire for genuine fellowship in the modern urban world. One might be tempted to say that on every page Ridgway is asking his readers: how does one truly connect with another human being in the twenty-first century?

And if there is an answer to this question, it might be located in the book's middle section, "The Story," or in its final section, "The Song." I won't ruin the book by discussing the last chapter, but in "The Story," Anna and the Stoker sit in The Arms, the pub where many of these chapters take place, telling each other fanciful, fictional stories of their lives. This is obviously a game they often play, and it sustains them amid their everyday lives. How do we commune with one other? By talking, by telling stories, even if they're fictional ones. It's these moments of human connection that make Keith Ridgway's A Shock not only a surprising technical achievement but a book of rare emotional depth. These are the stories going on around us every day, behind a neighbor's curtain or the door of our local pub. What's compelling about A Shock is Ridgway's ability to tell these stories with a refreshingly avant-garde sensibility that deftly balances genuine sentiment and innovative, contemporary storytelling.