Tradition and Form in Old Romantics

Devyn Andrews

Book Review

A review of Maggie Armstrong’s Old Romantics (Biblioasis). Purchase the book directly from the publisher here.

There’s an irresistible deadpan underpinning Irish writer Maggie Armstrong’s debut Old Romantics—if Armstrong’s title choice elicits any preliminary notions of sentimentality, just give her five or six paragraphs to set the record straight. Rendered as a collection of linked short stories, we first meet Old Romantics’ (aptly-named) central character Margaret on her lunch break during a summer internship program. After a young man cuts her in line and purchases the last of the café’s grilled cheese sandwiches, Margaret watches him eating: 

Her pencil skirt made it awkward to sit and her blouse clung to her flesh in the heat. At the other end of the bench, he ate her sandwich. She noted the animal way he attacked her sandwich. How, when he was finished, he balled up the paper and left it there between them on the bench to unball. He was very nice-looking, with a symmetrical face, like the face of the prince in the pantomime she had seen as a little girl and become obsessed with. She would one day use the word ‘savage’ to describe his body, in an email he never replied to.

While the book initially bills itself as a kind of love story, Old Romantics is instead a fresh and formally inventive character study borne out of a productive tension between the its central subject matter and its compositional goals: the architectural bent towards discrete, linked short stories, on the one hand; and a more novelistic narrative-thematic arc encompassing a single character, her mind, and her occurrences on the other. Following Margaret across an impressive time period stretching from youth through marriage and into motherhood, Armstrong eschews conventional novelistic structure in favor of a patchworked narrative of powerfully distilled moments.

Leveraging both the first and third person, Armstrong shows us Margaret from a variety of distances and angles, at seemingly banal moments (hiding in the restroom stall at work, at the beach with her young son) and during more pivotal times (navigating infidelity and pregnancy, during a terse conversation with a police officer). The result is a kind of gestalt in which Margaret is revealed in rich fragments and by critical degrees; as in the real world, readers get sense that the truth lies somewhere between what Margaret tells us, what we learn from her consciousness, and what is left off of the page.

Armstrong’s work engages in contemporary literary conversation about motherhood and its discontents as well as gender expectations in romance, taking a place in a current lineage with roots in the sparse autofictional novels of the previous decade and ghosts in the Victorian marriage plots (and, perhaps, a matriarch in Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch). But it is ultimately the wry tone and in-on-the-joke sensibility that differentiates Old Romantics from its immediate literary family. There is none of the saccharine and relatively little, even, of the romantic love in Armstrong’s debut; there is, however, a great deal of ingenuity and spirit in both her style and form, and much to love indeed about the resulting portrait of a bold, complex and imperfect woman, determined to make sense of it all.

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Old Romantics

Maggie Armstrong

Biblioasis

$24

256pp

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Devyn Andrews is a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago Program for Writers. Her work has been published in Cutthroat, Memezine, and elsewhere. Previously, she lived in Boston and Sacramento. See more at devynandrews.com.