As the deceptively fearsome novel The Art of Falling begins, a teacher has summoned Nessa McCormack, who lives in a well-heeled suburb of Cork, to her 16-year-old daughter's school, alleging that Jennifer has been bullying another student--Mandy Wilson, who used to be Jennifer's best friend. Although Nessa recognizes the parental obligation to appear distressed at the news, she registers relief at news of the girls' withered friendship: "If Jennifer and Mandy had not been friends, then perhaps Cora Wilson would never have gotten to know Philip and might have confined her affections to her own husband."
Of a lesser, but still acute, concern to Nessa is the debt that Philip has racked up thanks to his atrocious instincts for property investment. Nessa's job at an art gallery is a vital source of both income and pride. She's the project manager for a major acquisition: the studio of the artist Robert Locke, dead nearly 20 years but still an object of some fascination. Everything is going smoothly with the acquisition until Nessa is confronted by a woman who insists that she worked on one of Locke's most celebrated pieces and wants to be credited for her contribution.
The Art of Falling can read like a beleaguered-everymom novel, although Danielle McLaughlin (Dinosaurs on Other Planets) isn't playing Nessa's circumstances for laughs. While the book's characters occasionally behave in implausible ways out of what seems like narrative necessity, McLaughlin's gifted storytelling and dexterous sentences are amply compensatory. At times her plotting verges on masterly, as when she introduces an aspect of Nessa's past that infiltrates her work and family lives with the gentleness of an ice bath. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer