“I’d hate to be bystanding this on my own.” “Thanks for being here with me,” the narrator says to the reader as the novel’s craziness reaches its tipping point. Each Doe has been on the receiving or delivering end of more violence and sexual assault than any of them can acknowledge, even to themselves. Burns’s irreverent, omniscient narrator moves from the combusting mind of a gun-shop owner named Tom to various members of the homicidal Doe family, whose first names begin with an absurd fill-in-the-blank blur of J’s, ranging from Jetty to Jotty to JanineJuliaJoshuatine. The question serves as a kind of humorous warning, since the novel that follows contains an astonishing range of breakdowns. “Aren’t breakdowns amazing in their versatility?” the narrator remarks in the opening pages. Like “Milkman,” “Little Constructions” features a large cast of relatives in a criminal-run Irish town during the Troubles, all of them internally detonating in their respective ways. “Little Constructions” is her second novel, written before her widely acclaimed fourth book, “Milkman,” received the Man Booker Prize in 2018. Why do certain relatives get “squashed explosively” in a person’s psyche? Over four works of fiction, Anna Burns has developed a singular prose style for simulating the internal explosion of familial voices in a character’s head.
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