(A poet as well as a novelist, O’Connor has a musical ear for language Joyce and Nora never seem to lose their lilt.) Yes, literati like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, and Sylvia Beach make requisite appearances, but Nora is principally the story of a Galway girl and her “Jim,” eking out some semblance of an existence far from home. Joyce’s drinking and uselessness with money form a throughline, as do their constant moves between Italy, France, and Switzerland.
His companion for 37 years (and the mother of both his children), Nora has long sat at the center of Joycian lore she was the model for Ulysses’s Molly Bloom and, in her youthful trysts, inspired two characters in “The Dead.” With Nora, O’Connor leans into that context-as she does into Joyce’s famously filthy letters to his “wildflower of the hedges”-depicting a relationship as lousy with passion as it was with chaos. She takes the same approach in Nora, a long but lively portrait of James Joyce’s wife and muse, Nora Barnacle Joyce. In her fiction, Nuala O’Connor has often explored the private lives of historical figures she did it in 2015’s Miss Emily, about Emily Dickinson, and in 2018’s Becoming Belle, about singer and dancer Belle Bilton.
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