Alice Falling

An adept psychological drama told with poetic precision, Irish writer Wall's debut is an incisive portrait of sadism and an exploration of how childhood sexual abuse reverberates and mutates throughout the life of one woman, Alice Lynch. The death of Alice's older sister, Sheila, is a destructive catalyst in the lives of the novel's characters, their grief setting into motion a chain of events that causes everyone lasting, convoluted misery. When Sheila died, Alice was a pubescent student at a convent school, suffering the molestation of a priest, Father Bennis. As she grows older, she allies herself with Sheila's boyfriend, Paddy, entering into a disastrous marriage with him. Wall crafts the psychological landscapes of his characters with great care, and the satellite characters are as complex as the main players. John is the young philosophy student who blindly falls in love with Alice, who believes she's incapable of love. Alice identifies with Sandy, Paddy's mistress, whom he brutally beats and rapes; and the two women concoct a violent plot that will act as a catharsis for Sandy's physical pain and Alice's long-buried rage. The narrative bends to fit Alice's dementia, as she replays the priest's haunting and damaging words throughout her adult life and grows increasingly untethered. After carefully constructing the emotional groundwork for the characters, Wall's decision to swell the latter half of the book with violence undermines the quality of the earlier story. Still, the prose is exact and stunning, describing with devastating clarity the ways in which women internalize sexual and emotional abuse. (Oct.)