Review: "Grace" by Paul Lynch

Paul Lynch’s third novel, Grace, is easily the most beautifully written novel I have read all year. Reading through it and sometimes struggling through it, I was aware of every sentence and their structure, the hard work put into them and the immense pleasure of the finished product, all of which mostly made up for some of the less engaging narrative elements, such as its meandering and vague plot and confusing characterizations that had me baffled at some points the way Cormac McCarthy always tends to baffle me. But like McCarthy, the beauty of the finished product, even if that beauty is somewhat superficially or needlessly dense, it is always something to behold. This is a very different novel than Lynch’s last one, The Black Snow, and I don’t doubt it is his best work to date. Taking place during the Irish potato famine in the mid-19^th century, this immense coming of age story focuses on Grace, a woman on the edge of adulthood, who, in the book’s first striking scene, has her hair lopped off by her mother and sent out into the world to survive on her own. With her younger brother Colly, a young boy who tells jokes without punch lines, tagging along, Grace must navigate a world pushed to the brink by hunger and madness, and along the way she meets people both menacing, helpful and somewhere in between, the most memorable being Bart, a man with a crippled hand who joins them halfway through the book, and is involved in one of the book’s most harrowing scenes involving another character, the chatterbox McNutt. Toward the end, after the book seemingly goes off the rails, Grace finds herself involved in a religious sect and finally, some semblance of home in the book’s haunting final pages. Not an easy read, nor easy to decipher, but as a work of art and labor of love, it is something I deeply admire. 
Rating: 4/5