Knick Knack Paddy Whack: A Novel
by Ardal O’HanlonHenry Holt, 244 pp., $23
About a fourth of the way through his debut novel, Ardal O’Hanlon lets his first-person narrator, 19-year-old Patrick Scully, get laid by a girl who looks “a bit like your man the lead singer from Soft Cell.” Drunk on vodka in some dark corner of a backwater Irish town’s biggest nightclub, Aisling, the girl, initiates foreplay by announcing her impending suicide. Scully takes a typically awkward shot at cheering her. “Look you don’t know what’s around the next corner,” he tells the girl while he confides in the reader that “I wasn’t quite sure what it meant but it sounded good. My father used to always say it to me anyway. If I was ever to write a book I’d write it in such a way that the readers wouldn’t know what was around the next corner.”
Scully’s remark about a hypothetical book that may or may not be out there ahead of him somewhere is revealing. It’s almost as if O’Hanlon himself is making a self-conscious observation about his own novel’s style and structure. The basic plot scenario of Knick Knack Paddy Whack is a tried and true one, opening on a crime already committed and then delivering the backstory that led to it. Still, O’Hanlon successfully juggles the events he describes so that they are as surprising as they are inevitable. So much of the “disturbing” and “sinister” element that other critics have attached to this “finally horrifying tale,” seems to come from the detachment that Scully displays toward his own actions. The implications of these actions O’Hanlon artfully conceals until the end of the book, so that Scully seems all the more monstrous for the fairly decent effort he puts in to make a good crack with the boys at the pub afterward.
The structure of Knick Knack Paddy Whack, for the most part, does reflect its own subject matter. On the most basic level the novel is about one lurid weekend, sometime in the early Eighties, in the life of a dispossessed Irish youth. Scully’s narration is chock-full of fits and starts and seemingly random blind alleys, the digressions of a boozing and horny young loser whose hate for humanity is matched by his hilarious powers of observation. His rant about what normally happens during a young swain’s drinking nights, when he gets much closer to his own vomit than he does to any of his dreams, recalls a hard-up, adolescent version of Céline or Henry Miller. Scully’s misanthropic excursions, however, are a little more concise. He manages to pass out drunk “with his hair matted in his curry chips,” with one last thought that “Jaysus, I can’t wait till next weekend,” with a brevity that’s much more suited to the conventions of a contemporary novel.
This article appears in March 31 • 2000.