The Rachel Incident

This cluster of chapters sets up The Importance of Enduring Friendship that will define Rachel and James’s relationship. The cottage on Shandon Street functions throughout the novel as a symbol of their coming of age and the place that facilitated it. The house is a space just for the two of them, and their shared bed signifies their emotional intimacy. As their intimacy deepens, Rachel’s other relationships wane. Jonathan refuses to accept James’s place in her life and ends the relationship. Though Rachel is not really saddened by this, the conflict with Jonathan will reflect a later conflict between her and her future husband, James Carey, over his place in her life. The cocoon of Shandon Street nurtures James Devlin and Rachel, but it is unclear if there is room in the cottage or Rachel’s life for another person. This conflict introduces an additional nuance to The Importance of Enduring Friendship, showing that while deep platonic intimacy like Rachel and James’s can be profoundly meaningful and transformative, it can also create barriers to developing other aspects of their lives and identities.

The deepening friendship between Rachel and James also offers Rachel a new identity to try on, furthering the theme of Experimentation as a Means of Self-Exploration. Her Bookshop Girl persona having failed, Rachel takes on the role of James’s secret-keeper. This persona, like the Bookshop Girl persona, both reflects and reinforces her insecurities, particularly her belief that she is not as lovable as she is. In fact, James loved her before she knew any of his secrets, as he tells her many years later: “I put this to him once, drunk and years after the fact. He was lightly horrified. He said he loved me always. And despite saying crazy things like this, loved me still” (68). Still, James’s own actions are a part of Rachel’s insecurity: Despite their emotional intimacy, James’s relationship with her crush, Byrne, intensifies Rachel’s worry that she is physically unattractive. Once again, the novel shows that while friendship and experimentation are crucially important to self-development, they can be simultaneously constructive and harmful.

Another important aspect of Rachel’s and James’s Experimentation as a Means of Self-Exploration is their sexual experimentation. The sexual mores of early-2000s Ireland form the backdrop of the action in this section. Rachel wants to date and has sexual desires but worries about being judged for wanting and having sex. As an adult, she sees her college years taking place during “a kind of crossroads of female messaging” where “Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks” coexisted with Ireland’s oppressive abortion bans and “the locked-up girls of the Magdalene laundries” (75). She struggles to find a way forward where she can be a sexual being without shame. James also struggles to come to grips with his desires. He worries about coming out in a country where same-sex activity was only decriminalized in 1993. Due to his internalized shame, he thinks it is normal to accept sporadic encounters with married men as a form of intimacy. He will never be able to bring Byrne home to meet his mother, and this is part of the appeal for him at this time. Both James and Rachel will navigate their sexuality and desires as part of their journey into adulthood.

Finally, part of Rachel’s coming of age is learning to see adults as people who also have foibles and feelings. In this section of the novel, Byrne and his wife, Deenie Harrington-Byrne, provide the key examples of this motif. Byrne provides an example of the ways insecurities continue to shape adult behavior. While his worry over his novel’s popularity is endearing, his infidelity to his wife and disregard for her feelings is much less so. In Chapter 5, Byrne tells Rachel his book The Kensington Diet is about famine in Victorian Ireland. Rachel responds by quoting a poem by Irish poet Eavan Boland called “The Famine Road.” The poem is not only about the historical famine but about Boland’s infertility, and unbeknownst to Rachel, particularly relevant to Byrne and Deenie’s marriage since they are struggling to conceive. This sets up the repeated motif of famine being associated with the Harrington-Byrnes. There is an emotional poverty to their marriage that Rachel and James are just seeing the beginnings of in these chapters. On the other hand, though Deenie plays an important role in the love triangle between Byrne and James, she also serves as a mentor to Rachel later in the book. Rachel initially sees her as a romantic rival, but in adulthood, she remembers Deenie’s compassion: “She was, before anything else, an extremely kind person” (52). While her husband’s foibles present challenges to Rachel and James that they must overcome, Deenie provides Rachel with support and an example of an adult as a flawed but still fundamentally good person.