Book Review :: Close to Home by Michael Magee

Review by Kevin Brown
Sean is a young man in Belfast, Ireland, who spends most of his time drinking or doing drugs, seemingly not making any progress in life. He and one of his best friends, Ryan, live in an apartment that they’re about to be evicted from, as their landlord ran away, and it has black mold growing in it, as well. They both work as bartenders to try to make some money, but they’ve been barred from most of the places they try to go and drink due to their behavior. In fact, the novel opens with Sean about to go to court for punching somebody at a house party, causing serious harm to the young man’s face and mouth.
However, life wasn’t supposed to go this way for Sean, as he was different than his friends. He left Belfast and went to Liverpool, where he attended university and received a degree in English. He wanted to be a writer.
He has long odds to overcome, though, as his family has fallen apart. His mother left his father when Sean was young, and it’s clear that the lack of a father has wrecked Sean. He spends part of his free time looking his father online, as well as his half-sister from his father’s new marriage. Both of Sean’s brothers behave as recklessly as he does, prompting his mother to be surprised that it’s Sean who ends up going to court due to violence. They may have learned that violence from the IRA members they grew up around.
The one bit of light in Sean’s life is Mairéad, a young woman Sean grew up with. She was as violent and out of control as Sean and his friends, but she has changed her life. She spends much of the novel preparing to move to Berlin to try to break into the world of independent filmmaking. The problem is Sean makes the same mistakes again and again. Magee raises the question of how much environment shapes people and how one can love friends and family who might be preventing one from growing. There aren’t easy answers, but the reader continues to hope Sean can figure his life out.
Close to Home by Michael Magee. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. IG, Threads, and BlueSky: @kevinbrownwrites