Contemporary Authors

• Orchid & the Wasp - 2018 Hogarth, New York, NY

• Tin House - https://tinhouse.com/ambition-art-and-late-capitalism-an-interview-with-caoilinn-hughes/

  Interviews | July 10, 2018
  Ambition, Art, and Late Capitalism: An Interview with Caoilinn Hughes
  Taylor Lannamann
  Caoilinn Hughes’s debut novel, Orchid & the Wasp, has the fluid gait of something alive. You want to run after Gael—Hughes’s protagonist—as she emerges from a complicated childhood and into a young adulthood marked by quick thinking and interpersonal finesse. At once exuberant and incisive, Hughes’s writing escapes simple characterization while somehow remaining welcoming; you’ll want to luxuriate in the prose, even when Gael’s wit and impressive calculations skyrocket the story to new heights. This is not simply a coming of age tale, nor is it an experiment in narrative philosophy. What is it, then? I’m not sure, other than that it’s something new, and that the best way to describe it is to speak circuitously—which is the case for most things worth talking about.
  I first encountered Hughes’s dynamic voice several years ago, when I was in graduate school and interning at Tin House. An early excerpt of Orchid & the Wasp circulated amongst the magazine’s editors, and I remember the thrill I felt when that crackling piece made its way into my hands. Eager to read more, I bought her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence, and was equally floored by her expansive language and searching eye. Since then, I’ve had the good fortune of meeting Caoilinn, and have had the honor of publishing her poetry in a journal I co-edit. The following interview evolved through a series of emails while Caoilinn and I languished in separate Brooklyn apartments in the breathless heat of early July.
  ◆◆◆
  TAYLOR LANNAMANN: I’d love to know how you developed Orchid & the Wasp’s fields of interest, because the novel has so many constellations of knowledge and expertise. The narrative is fluent in a number of niche areas—orchestral conducting, economic theory, art dealing. The list goes on. Did you begin with prior knowledge of these subjects, or did Gael’s development as a character prompt unexpected research?
  CAOILINN HUGHES: I am a hopeless multitasker and a procrastinator, which means that when I’m writing, I’m writing—slowly, excruciatingly, obsessively and all-consumingly—but I will put off that writing for as long as possible. I await peak self-loathing. A foxed wallpaper of unpaid bills. By the time I sit down to write, I cannot give myself anymore excuses to put it off. So I haven’t to date written a single thing for which I have had to do more than a cursory amount of research. A day here, a day there. (Albeit, you can learn a lot in a day.) But I read a lot and broadly, I am lecherous about other people’s knowledge, and I have had some life experience besides sitting at a desk! I do believe it makes sense to write about what you’re interested in, meaning what you know something about by way of being interested. Also, never underestimate the consolidating power of a good gestation period! I could never finish a story or poem or novel and immediately start another. However useful it would be to be able to do that, I’m not overly concerned that I can’t, as downtime is when I discover new interests and when I observe things freshly and openly. Going from one piece of writing to the next would make a skipping record of me, stuck on the same note.
  TL: There’s an indescribable bond between Gael and her brother Guthrie. Their connection feels quite strong, but also delicate and complex, made up of layers of tension and forgiveness. What goes into crafting such real and nuanced relationships? Did Gael and Guthrie’s rapport emerge as a by-product of who they are as individual characters, or did you have to hone the way you wrote about them as a pair?

  CH: I have four siblings and, to me, sibling relationships are some of the most beautiful, rich, centring, complex relationships there can be. They can also be the most stagnant, false, judgmental, traumatizing, sickening and tortured relationships, in which individuality is denied. Can the same be said of friendships and collegial relationships? Can the same even be said of romantic relationships? The answer to both of those questions could be ‘yes,’ I don’t know. Perhaps it’s personal. For example, if you learn of one man’s indifference to the tragedies befalling his older brother, to me, that is inherently fascinating. Whereas, in non-familial relationships, one man’s indifference to another could be fascinating, but not necessarily. I think that’s why it’s so hard to pull off a novel with only non-familial relationships—to build an equally complex emotional entanglement. That said, I did want to contrast these relationships to non-familial bonds in Orchid & the Wasp. For at least half of the book, the protagonist is away from familial and intimate relationships. She has intense, complex, caring connections with strangers. She has shallow, judgmental, misleading and meaningless encounters too. This is an intentional disruption of the family saga arc. But with Gael and Guthrie, it’s not only that they have an intense relationship; how their deeds, decisions and ideologies play off one another constitutes one of the book’s central thematic motifs. Some days, they seemed to me like two sides of the same coin. Other days, they seemed irreconcilable. As soon as I got to know them both, I knew I had a novel.
  TL: Is it important for an author to know at the outset what questions her novel poses? During your writing process, do you gradually find your way to such concerns, or do you begin with an animating question?
  CH: I don’t believe you need to know a book’s concerns from the outset: in fact, I hold that you shouldn’t! My writing process is to write into the dark—I don’t like to know where a novel will go, what it will ask, do, think, say. I had to abandon a new novel recently after four months, with only 1,250 words to show for it (and tiny scars on the backs of my shoulders from where I’d torn my skin in histrionic writerly angst) because I had done in those 1,250 words what I’d imagined would take me several chapters to bring to life; to realize the central concern on the page, in a scene. There was no way I could continue beyond that point. I knew too much. I’d already arrived at a place I thought I wanted to go. I did start Orchid & the Wasp with something, though: with the charge of Gael’s character, and the title. I need to say more about the title before returning to your question…
  In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, philosophers Deleuze and Guattari refer to the relationship between a wasp and a rare orchid that resembles a wasp. (Besides mimicking its physiology, the flower emits mock female wasp pheromones. When the wasp tries to mate with it, pollen latches to his head or rear-end. The wasp eventually gives up, aware of his new burden but unable to shake it off. Soon he’s lured by another orchid and so becomes the pollen-bearer.) The philosophers use this relationship to describe the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of each species, proposing that both are transformed without being assimilated. It’s impossible to paraphrase, but suffice it to say that on some level, I took from Deleuze and Guattari the latent rejection of capitalism being written into theories of evolution, and also the possibility of “becoming” … but the character I was hosting in my subconscious kept wriggling out of the philosophers’ ephemeral, reciprocal, intricate, rhizomatic interpretations of the orchid-wasp relationship. She wanted to keep only its simple ecological utility: the wasp gains nothing. It’s rare to have a non-symbiotic system in nature. In society, however, mutualism and commensalism are what’s rare; especially in late stage capitalism, or this vortical Neo Liberalist corporatist corruptist oligarchy-in-the-making epoch.
  I also happened to be reading about the Libor scandal at the time (the collusion between major banks to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate, by which banks illegally profited from trades and/or appeared misleadingly creditworthy) and wondered to what extent any individual might have been effected (likely unbeknownst to us/them) via savings, mortgages, pensions, student loans, derivatives, holdings etc. Settlement payments from banks including Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and HSBC are now in the billions … and yet, the wasp flies from flower to flower, falling for duplicitous interest rates, I mean pheromones. (A quick note here that this makes it a historical novel already, because the public consciousness is vigilant in such a different way now than it was in 2002, in 2008 and in 2011, when the bulk of the book takes place.) The orchid and the wasp became a shorthand for referring to non-mutualism in nature. With it came the question: is it really exploitation if the loser isn’t aware of his loss? On personal, familial, national and societal levels, this question pervaded my thinking. I hadn’t quite articulated this to myself from the outset, but it was close enough to a fully-formed idea to be worrisome. So I decided to put that right upfront in the book, blatantly. So that, even if it was still hovering throughout, there would be no threat that that was all the book would be exploring, a hundred thousand words later. If I put that upfront, the book could become something else. What it becomes, I will leave to the reader.
  Intellectualism can ruin good art, so I try not to prove any point or advance any notion or agenda when I write. I try to know as little as possible, and to let the characters and novel reveal to me what I was interested in all along. I only know and see that once I’m in neck-deep, when I have all the perspective of Winnie from Beckett’s Happy Days. In my next novel, I only discovered what the book was about as I wrote the final 300 words. It was an astonishing, devastating discovery.
  TL: In terms of not letting intellectualism ruin good art, can you talk more about how you so seamlessly wove the novel’s thematic and symbolic material throughout the narrative?
  CH: As I wrote Gael’s character into being (through abandoned scenes), I saw that I was writing a book about a woman in the world. If she had relationships, they wouldn’t be the engine of her narrative. It would be herself—her mind, ambitions, ideology, interests, actions—that would drive the story and the reader’s interest, not in the context of anyone else. So many books that excited me when I was in my early twenties were about individuals out in the world, up against it, exploring it, getting their kicks, doing stuff. Frankenstein. Endurance. Candide. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Things Fall Apart. Steppenwolf. Hamlet. Heart of Darkness. The Places in Between. The Stranger. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Books by men, about men. This might sound like a roundabout answer to your question, but the fact that the book became picaresque—pursuing the protagonist’s deliberations, movements and actions over and above her ties, troubles and community—quite naturally accommodated various thematic interests, because they’re the things with which she was interested or concerned. It wasn’t patching anything together. It was just paying heed to her mind and drives in preference to her love interests and vulnerabilities. Although, the way she was brought up informed the some of the concepts explored, such as risk aversion, the mediocrity principle, negative liberty, negative capability (which isn’t named in the book, but it’s there!) and so on—so some of that is situational. I worked for Google for a while and ran a small business, and the experience and knowledge gleaned during those eye-opening soul-shrivelling years perhaps allowed for the organic inclusion of such ideas, in that they were readily available to me. Life experiences do feed into your writing, ideally in indirect ways, so here’s hoping my next novel won’t have to resort to chapters on the ethics of ‘butter flavoured’ popcorn and whether it’s possible to use a nail file to smooth out a chipped molar. (It’s not.)

  TL: Artistic proprietorship comes under scrutiny in this book. Do you think a person can justify appropriating somebody else’s talent in the interest of ushering beauty into the public eye?
  CH: What a question. What trouble I could get myself into! The logic and principles of art and ownership would require a book-length response (I hold some contradictory and contrary opinions on this, being a privacy fiend to the extent that I feel sick when dead artists’ correspondence are published without their instruction to do so, and I’ve had a detailed will since I was 20!) but I can say that my take on what is ethical, prudent and justifiable is very different to Gael’s/that of the narrative voice. I would say that bringing awareness to beauty in the public interest is a generous take on her motivations! The book is concerned with notions of worth, value, merit, due reward and the commodification of any citizen’s output. It considers late stage capitalism’s dilemma—built on the foundational quicksand that is the American dream—in both a philosophical and a pragmatic sense. Gael is convinced of the fallacy of meritocracy, as am I, though Gael is a lot younger and surer than me, and her response is more radical. I’m still a sucker-apprehensive-artist with a just-published book, strategically liking reviewer’s tweets (where’s the merit in that? who but the privileged few have time for that nonsense? and yet—appallingly—there are outcomes), hoping against hope that the novel’s merit will lift it to the front of the bookshelf, to the ink of the newspaper, to O Magazine’s Books column, to Reese Witherspoon’s Instagram feed … but I’m contending with my own cynicism and a lot of industry knowledge about nepotism, networks, privilege, foregone conclusions, and if my book gets more attention than any other worthy book (particularly books by less privileged people) I will try not to delude myself into thinking the book deserved it. It would be lucky, is what it would be. A quantum mechanical royal flush.
  Gael’s journey also explores what place there is for ambition, within such a fallacious system; especially if neither power nor money are sought. We should be heading into a post-boring-job utopia of universal basic wage, free education, the eradication of poverty and the re-imagining of value, citizens’ contribution and what makes for a good life. Instead we have a retrogressive farce centre-stage (that is, stage right … far right) in the UK and the US, tugging us farther and farther back into the mire of defunct legislature, seeking out nostalgic notions of inherent superiority, godliness and inalienable rights. When the labour politician and sociologist Michael Young—who coined the term ‘meritocracy’ in a 1958 satirical essay—saw Tony Blair adopting it as the fundamental philosophy of the New Labour project, he wrote in the Guardian: ‘It is good sense to appoint individual people to jobs on their merit. It is the opposite when those who are judged to have merit of a particular kind harden into a new social class without room in it for others.’ And here we are, with ‘winners and losers’ back in the political parlance and the Tories insisting that talent will rise to the top, regardless of background. In her first statement as Prime Minister, Theresa May told ‘ordinary working class families’: ‘I know you’re working around the clock, I know you’re doing your best, and I know that sometimes life can be a struggle. The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. … When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws, we’ll listen not to the mighty but to you. … We will do everything we can to help anybody, whatever your background, to go as far as your talents will take you.’
  As far as your talents will take you. It is absurd that this satire is still tendered to the patrons and populace for hope and solace, but it is. As the art world is meant to be the one arena where meritocracy has a place, it made sense that the book would go there, though that happened organically. It was unplanned.
  TL: In case the world doesn’t already know, you’re also a fantastic poet. What has it been like transitioning to fiction? Have you carried over any practices from writing verse?
  CH: Why, thank you! I grew up reading poetry and plays, because that’s what was in the house (all it would take was some character recalled or a cloud’s shadow cast across the kitchen window to prompt my father to quietly recite reams of poetry from memory—that had its impact) and, then, because I’d become accustomed to density and concision, the novel seemed a laborious, intimidating thing. Poetry and plays were slim and had all this blank space around them for you to take up. They were by definition dialogic. Not everything was spelled out or filled in, but everything included was essential. It didn’t matter how much was lost on me—a spoonful of such stuff was sustaining. Yevtushenko. Neruda. Dickinson. Shakespeare. Pinter. Cane. Coward. Lorca. Shaw. Marina Carr. I began to answer back with verses and scenes from an early age. By ten, my primary school was staging my original episode of Father Ted. The production might have launched my career if the script hadn’t been so priggishly censored. How can a budding writer do her best work on a measly quota of ‘fecks’?
  Probably because I didn’t read novels, I got a B minus in English at school and I couldn’t get into any college in England or Ireland to study literature. I flung To Kill A Mocking Bird out the window. I made an erasure poem of The Scarlet Letter. I begged my parents to make a trip to Belfast so that I could show a fusty old professor at Queen’s the score of poems I’d had published in magazines. Belfast was the U.K., which meant they counted fewer of your grades, and it was not the done thing to go up North back then, so even though I didn’t have the grades for there either, I thought they might need my demographic. ‘Southerner’ or ‘Irish’, depending on who you asked. One little word here, one little word there, and oh the implications! I remember imploring the Medievalist, whose skin—I later scribbled down—had the hue and texture of Pritt-stick to consider the fact that I had rhymed the word ‘duty’ with ‘beauty’. I got in. However it happened, at university, I finally found some novel that was enough like a poem or play to take me by the hand into the realm of prose. But before long I discovered story and the many joys of fiction intrinsic to the form, as a reader. I still only wrote poems, then.
  In terms of writing, the transition to fiction came because I’d moved to New Zealand after my MA, and part of the culture shock was moving from Belfast’s smoky, dark back rooms full of hook-shouldered people conversing sombrely about the sucker punch of a good end-stopped couplet to a place where there were huge bright blue open skies with sunshine and mountain biking and volcanoes and a sea with orcas in it and slightly awkward New Zealanders (highly endearing and endlessly capable) who I didn’t know yet how to talk to, certainly not about gnomic verse. I didn’t know what to do with myself. It didn’t help that this coincided with getting a real adult job and the like. So I let a year or so go by where I wasn’t writing much, and self-loathing and existential angst began to accrue … I had to do something! A loosely connected series of haikus? Anything! A fecking Limerick. Even … Higgs save us … prose.
  I had never so much as written a piece of flash fiction. Not a single short story. So the obvious thing to do was start a novel. With no training, no guidebooks, no clue, no writer friends in the hemisphere to drive me home when I’d had too many adverbs. Then I met a writer friend who read a few chapters and told me I should stick to poetry. Upon hearing those words, the volume went up on my inner mission impossible soundtrack and I knocked back a cartridge of fountain pen ink. A few learning-wheel novels later, hey presto, watch me go! steadily accruing #DNFs on Goodreads (Did Not Finish), which I try to apprize for their Beckettian dramatic irony.
  TL: Now that Orchid & the Wasp is out in the world—accruing more stars than acronyms—will you return to poetry? Are you working on anything now?
  CH: I hope to get another poetry book together next year, but meanwhile, I’ve been writing short stories for the first time, and am editing a new novel, which is a big departure from Orchid, except that it took from Gael that risk aversion is the same as loss aversion and, if the status quo is what you’re protecting, what’s to lose?

  Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish writer whose debut novel, Orchid & the Wasp, is just out (Hogarth, July 10th). Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet 2014), won the Irish Times Shine/Strong Award and was a finalist for four other prizes. Her work has appeared in Granta, Tin House, POETRY, Poetry Ireland, Best British Poetry, on BBC Radio 3 and elsewhere.
  Taylor Lannamann’s fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Literary Review, and Joyland. His essays and reviews have been published by Kenyon Review Online, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Tin House Online. He holds an MFA from The New School and is an editor of Poet’s Country.

• Read It Forward - https://www.readitforward.com/8-great-questions/caoilinn-hughes-orchid-and-the-wasp/

  8 Great Questions: Caoilinn Hughes
  The Irish writer unfurls a least-favorite word and sums up the everlasting power of Shakespeare.
  By Jesse Aylen • 2 months ago

  In Caoillin Hughes‘ dazzlingly original debut novel, Orchid and the Wasp, introduces a heroine of mythic proportions in Gael Foess, a tough, thoughtful, and savvy opportunist determined to live life on her own terms. Raised in Dublin by single-minded, careerist parents, Gael learns early how a person’s ambitions and ideals can be compromised— and she refuses to let her vulnerable younger brother, Guthrie, suffer such sacrifices. Written in heart-stopping prose, Orchid and the Wasp is a novel about gigantic ambitions and hard-won truths, chewing through sexuality, class, and politics, and crackling with joyful, anarchic fury.
  Recently, Caoillin spoke with Read It Forward about a favored book that transcends cultural times, the power of passing along poetry to others, and why she’ll always be the tactful one in a room.

  Featured Image: Lorenzo Gritti
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  What’s the book on your bedside table?
  The book that I literally just finished was Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World. I was really interested because of the art scenes in Orchid and the Wasp. She's a really intelligent writer, and there's a density about the writing that I really enjoy. I'm looking forward to Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. The cover alone! I love her short stories, but the cover is so good.
  What’s the one book you tell everyone to read?
  First and foremost, Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a book of our generation. I genuinely believe that if the human species survives another 50 years, and if we have a culture that resembles the culture we have now, which is not a given, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing will be one of the books that will last.
  What word do you love and why? What word do you hate and why?
  I'm with at least six billion other people on the word moist. Words that I love—eviscerate is a good word, and I like the word tact. It's something about how it looks like what it is.
  What’s the one book you love to give as a gift and to whom do you give it?
  I would give the two poetry books that won all the prizes: Ocean Vuong's Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Sinéad Morrissey's On Balance. Sinéad Morrissey has been my all-time favorite poet all my life. It's bizarre that she's alive when I’m living, and I really think her poetry is something else. I often gift poetry books because a lot of people wouldn't have poetry otherwise in their lives.
  What’s the one book you read as a kid that has stuck with you?
  Hamlet. I know that sounds really pretentious, but it was the first work of literature that I lived inside of for years. I suppose, like all precocious kids, I saw myself as a little bit identified with Hamlet. I used to write lines from it all over my room. I loved the idea that a single line or a couplet could carry on and on in its resonance and meaning—that you could go back to it and see something new.
  What’s the one book that never fails to delight or inspire you?
  The Sellout by Paul Beatty. I read all the books that were on the Booker shortlist that year. I would have bet my house—and I would have lost my house—because the odds of it winning were so low, and it's a lottery anyway. I would have lost my house but been conceited and proud about it all anyway, and telling everyone to read the book.
  If you could only read one genre for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
  Oh, what a cruel question. I would choose fiction over poetry because you can find super poetic novels. Grief is a Thing with Feathers was a novel, apparently, but that's like a prose poem to me. There are novels you can find that satisfy the desire for that angle and that kind of realism. Half of my education came by way of fiction, so I believe fiction does a pretty good job of informing us about the world.
  What’s the last book you read on a long flight?
  I loved Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo, and I read that on a flight. That was one of those books perfect for a flight, in that you wanted to live the whole story in one go. It spans a bit of time, and it has a large story, in the sense that you see into these people's lives and not just a moment—but the arc of that story is very singular, so it's a satisfying book to read in one sitting if you can.

• Read It Forward - https://www.readitforward.com/author-interview/caoillin-hughes/

  A Conversation with Caoilinn Hughes
  The Irish debut novelist sounds off on her excruciating writing process, and how not all poets wear berets.
  By Abbe Wright • 2 months ago

  In Orchid and the Wasp, Caoilinn Hughes introduces us to Gael Foess, a heroine of mythic proportions. A tough, thoughtful, and savvy opportunist, Gael’s determined to live life on her own terms. Raised in Dublin by careerist parents, Gael learns early how a person’s ambitions and ideals can be compromised—and refuses to let her younger brother, Guthrie, suffer such sacrifices.
  After Gael’s financier father walks out on them during the economic crash of 2008, her family fractures. Her mother, a once-formidable conductor, becomes a shadow. Determined not to let her loved ones fall victim to circumstance, Gael leaves Dublin for the coke-dusted social clubs and galleries of London and Manhattan, always working an angle, yet becoming a stranger to those who love her. Written in electric prose, Orchid and the Wasp is about gigantic ambitions and hard-won truths; it’s a charged debut chewing through sexuality, class, and politics, and crackling with joyful, anarchic fury.
  Recently, Caoilinn sat down with Read It Forward’s Abbe Wright to discuss the arc of writing a novel that’s both personal and systemic in nature, and how cutting her novelist teeth with male protagonists led her to the wonder of Gael.
  Read It Forward: Congratulations on your debut novel! How does it feel to be a novelist?
  Caoilinn Hughes: It’s much more legitimizing than being a poet. As a poet, I used to always just say, “I teach.” It was too awkward to handhold people through that moment of picturing you in a beret eating baked beans.
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  RIF: But you’re not just a poet—you’re an award-winning poet. Tell us a little bit about what Orchid and the Wasp is all about.
  CH: My way into describing the book is through the title, which I came upon in a philosophy book by Deleuze and Guattari. It’s this mammoth tome about things that are impenetrable and obscure. This orchid and the wasp they use as shorthand for describing something societal. There’s a type of orchid in Western Australia that resembles a wasp; it emits a female wasp pheromone and structurally looks like a wasp, so male wasps try to mate with it. In the process, they’ll get the pollen attached to their forehead, this orange, highly humiliating feature, and they fly off in frustration. But a few minutes later, they’ll be lured by another orchid. It’s a process in nature that isn’t very common, something non-symbiotic.
  I wanted to use this shorthand for talking about non-mutualism in nature, societally. On a larger level, I was interested in what was happening with the LIBOR scandal, the London Interbank Offered Rate, around 2011—reading a lot about that at the time, really interested in talking with people about what was going on in the world in a way that didn’t simplify, or wasn’t afraid of acknowledging our own complicity in our exploitation. There were these things going on in my head when I was writing the book, and I had this character who I wanted to put on the page. She was in my head all along, all my life. I wrote two novels that had male protagonists because I didn’t want to learn on her. I wanted to be ready, you know?
  RIF: I feel like she’s perched on my shoulder saying funny, smart-alecky things. Tell us about Gael Foess.
  CH: The book spans a decade and each chapter, or section, is one day, and you’ve got 16 or so days; it’s all very active and in-scene. You see Gael when she’s 11, in the opening chapter, and it’s one of the formative moments. She’s already her own person on the first page. That was really exciting for me as a writer, because I didn’t want to write a book that was about a young woman discovering her own worth, her own flaws, and learning how to overcome them. I just wasn’t interested. I wanted to write this character who was already herself, negotiating the world in a way as informed as you can be at 11—perceptive, involved, and active. So, you see her in one of what are many moments that are formative, in that she comes away from them potentially more cynical and hardened.
  RIF: You can tell that she stands on her own two feet, but she’s very shaped by the other members of her family, like Jarleth and Sive, her dad and mom.
  CH: Sive is another one that every American reader might think is ‘Sieve.’ But there’s a very famous Irish play by John B. Keene called Sive. So, when you see the name Sive—Irish readers, their guts will turn. It’s such a wonderful play.
  RIF: Her brother, Guthrie, talks a bit about the way these three characters in her family shape Gael.
  CH: Her mother is an orchestra conductor, a formidable artist, and Gael intuits this from her mother’s personality. You can tell from the first page that she’s quite absent as a parent, she’s not really committed to motherhood. She’s a loving person, but a lot of children might come out of that parenting situation feeling unwanted, secondary. Gael has an awful lot of respect for her mother and that way of life, to live outside the conventions we expect people to adhere to, and know that it’s possible to be contrary not for the sake of being contrary, actually for something far more noble.
  Her father, Jarleth, is a financier. He happens to work for Barclays later on, one of the banks tied to the LIBOR scandal. That’s one of the notches in my head that bound the personal aspect of the book to the larger systemic ones. Jarleth is his own kind of force. I was aware of the fact that people would want more. They knew why there wasn’t more of him in the book, and that wanting is its own injury. The energy that comes from him toward Gael is kind of negative and scarring. His life would’ve been made had Gael been born male, and she senses this.
  Her brother’s very spiritual, and she perceives him as vulnerable. He does have health issues, and she wants to look out for him, but sees her father’s disappointment in his failure of masculinity, and that causes her anger and trauma. It lends her a grit that she’s constantly feeling the friction of, constantly working against. Gael and Guthrie are two sides of the same coin. Their environment has informed them and their very worked-through ideologies. They’re thoughtful kids, but their lives couldn’t be more different.
  RIF: Gael is so self-possessed. When she sees her mother as busy, it’s as if she knows, “I understand your life is taken up by creating art and telling other artists how to interpret music”—that Gael understands she doesn’t have time to be a mother. It’s heartbreaking and awe-inspiring that she, at 11, can understand, and see her father’s shortcomings, call him out, and be a sensitive protector of her brother. She’s wise beyond her years.
  CH: One of the things she sees in her mother is that it’s possible to live this life with your primary goal and ambition being something that has nothing to do with other people; the pulse running through your life not being relationships.
  RIF: The story takes place in three different cities. When you were writing, did it feel like each city had a different energy? Did you try to capture that?
  CH: Because Gael gets older, the energy changes a lot. I’m fascinated by how readers are going to respond depending on how quickly they read it. The energy changes so much, and this is reflecting where Gael is, her age, her impatience, and the escalation of her pursuit, her own line of inquiry. With the Dublin chapters, it begins in 2001, 2002. It’s the Celtic Tiger era, this moment where the sensibility of the people was divorcing from the everyday interests and pursuits. There was this strong sense that we were living in a way we’re not proud of, but isn’t it great craic? It’s great craic to have a panic room, go on five holidays a year, and have a house in Malaga.
  After the bubble burst, there were taxi drivers on the radio who admitted to being 30 million Euro in debt. They’d leveraged their property so much that they got themselves into that intractable situation. Ireland’s economic history is unusual, even within the context of Europe. We had multinationals coming in, a boom in all sorts of sectors, and funding from the EU to build the infrastructure. We had proper roads, the Euro currency, we identified very much as European. The change was too fast for an ideological and philosophical calibration, so that’s what you see in the first scenes.
  Then at the end, it’s post-crash. I remember hearing people talking about getting a tombstone, and they’d been offered one that had the stonecutter’s email address on it for a big discount. That kind of negotiation hadn’t been going on. Nobody would have been spending their emotional energy on the mortification of having someone’s email address on their husband’s tombstone. That was heartbreaking, to see the embarrassment.
  RIF: How quickly it changes. Talk a little bit about your process from reading these banking world headlines that planted a seed in your head, and how the novel grew out of that.
  CH: I spend months tearing my hair out and hitting my head against a wall. I have some horrendous habits. I’ve taught in the past, and whenever students ask me about my process I say, “As long as you’re not going to take any of it onboard.” Like, don’t do what I do. I have this awful habit of scratching my skin, my whole chest, face, neck, and everything. My partner will walk in my study, and it’s like I’ve been caught red-handed. I’m covered in scratches and he’s like, “How’s the writing going?” He can tell how well it’s going by how scratched I am.
  RIF: By your welts.
  CH: It’s an excruciating process because I write into the dark; I don’t do any planning. I don’t like to know very much at all. I start with a scene, and with that scene comes a setting and voice. I don’t need very much to start except a strong internal measure that I’m interested in that scene deeply. There’s something life-sized about that.
  It’s excruciating at the start, the first six or eight months, because I see writing as a massive block of marble you’ve been gifted. You’ve been bequeathed this beautiful piece of Connemara marble, and your novel is within it. But the only tool you have at the start is an axe. When you start hacking away at the marble, all of the chunks that fall away are irretrievable, and those chunks represent the novels that could have been. A lot of writers would think that’s nuts, because of course it’s retrievable. Have you heard of editing? But for me, that’s not true. I can do gestural changes once a book is written, but I edit as I go, so by the time I get to the last sentence, I might spend three days on that last sentence, but it’s done. I’ll work on larger edits with an editor after that, but there’s no retrieving and gluing on marble.
  RIF: But the paths that aren’t taken aren’t taken for a reason—those chunks of marble on the floor.
  CH: Hopefully.
  RIF: Is there anything in Gael of your experience being a woman that you translated to this heroine?
  CH: I was listening to one of your podcasts, and one of the authors brought up Flaubert and said “Of course, I’m all characters, including Madame Bovary.” I am as much Gael as I am Jarleth, Sive, and Harper—a character Gael has a relationship with—and her brother. With Gael specifically, it was terrifying to write the book in that people would assume I’m Gael. I first met with my agent over here, and I had to say, “I’m not Gael, but you’re going to think I am until we get to know each other.” I’ve worked with Google, run a business, I’ve done all this dirty stuff, so I share some of her interest in approaching the world from a strategic perspective. But there’s an awful lot of her ideology I don’t.
  As much as they’re nuanced, the differences in our ideologies are absolutely present. That made the book interesting to write because I had to figure out exactly what those were, where she sat, and whether she was deeply cynical, whether she was losing hope.
  RIF: Right.
  CH: She attends Occupy Wall Street, and you see how cynical and underwhelmed she is. The level of dialogue, to her, was hugely disappointing, so she sits in Trinity Church and works on business prospects while everyone else is out in the cold trying to live their beliefs. I could have written a 2,000-page novel following Gael. I’ll probably never quite let her go. A lot of the time, she’s on her own moving through the world.
  The danger in writing that way was if readers don’t love Gael, I’m screwed. I knew they weren’t going to love her; she’s not necessarily likable. But if they’re not intrigued, I’m screwed. When I was writing, I wasn’t thinking about the markets, I was thinking about readers. It was like being in love with somebody and not having told them yet, and the prospect of telling them and holding onto that hope.
  RIF: Is there something you hope readers take away when they reach the final page?
  CH: There are loads of questions that will hopefully arise in the reader’s mind, a few large questions. One of them is, “What is a good life?” The way we try to lift one another up, or help people we love, is always biased by our perspective of what someone’s life should look like. How it might be improved, might be less tortuous. But individuals are the only people who can make that decision for themselves. Your life can look wonderful on paper and, in reality, it’s a different story. The other way around, too; it can seem incredibly grim, or dull, and in reality I spend half my time in a cave, tearing my hair out. But on paper, I have a book coming out.
  RIF: And you’re an award-winning poet. Thank you so much, Caoilinn.

• From Publisher -

  Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish writer whose poetry collection Gathering Evidence (Carcanet, 2014) won the Irish Times Shine/Strong Award and was a finalist for the Seamus Heaney Prize, the Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers' Week, the Royal Society of NZ Science Book Prize and the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry. Her debut novel, Orchid & the Wasp, will be published in June 2018 by Hogarth and Oneworld. She is a fellow of the James Merrill Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Centre Culturel Irlandais, the Tin House Summer Workshop, Art Omi, and she has received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and the Ireland Funds Monaco Award. Her work has appeared in Tin House, POETRY, Granta, Best British Poetry, Poetry Ireland, BBC Radio 3, and elsewhere. She divides her time between the Netherlands and Ireland.

• Listowel Writers' Week - https://writersweek.ie/caoilinn-hughes-shortlisted-for-the-pigott-poetry-award-talks-all-things-poetry/

  Caoilinn Hughes, Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Award, Talks All Things Poetry
  Home News from Writers' Week / Caoilinn Hughes, Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Award, Talks All Things Poetry
  Caoilinn Hughes, Shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Award, Talks All Things Poetry
  Writers Week News from Writers' Week, Writer Interviews May 27, 2015

  Caoilinn Hughes
  Caoilinn Hughes was born in Galway and completed her MA at Queen’s Univeristy, Belfast. In 2007 she moved to New Zealand where she worked for Google, ran a small consultancy and wrote a PhD at Victoria University, Wellington. Her debut collection Gathering Evidence is shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Award 2015. Poems from the collection won the 2012 Patrick Kavanagh Award, the 2013 Cúirt New Writing Prize and Trócaire/Poetry Ireland Competition. Gathering Evidence picked up The Irish Times Strong/Shine Award 2015.
  Q. How important are poetry awards for poets?
  A. As important as medals to professional athletes. Granted, there’s more subjectivity involved in art competitions than the stopwatch can account for, but to pull off rhyming ‘goitered’ with ‘reconnoitered’ is surely equivalent to an Axel Jump! There needs to be multi-level podiums upon which great books can be celebrated – in bookshops, in reviews, in newspapers, at festivals. Those moments of recognition, just as for athletes, are hugely affirming and open opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Also, because the poetry book-buying market has too much of the haiku about it, awards are crucial to remind people to buy the most artistically accomplished poetry books.
  Q. What do you think the role of the poet is in the 21st century?
  A. Hmm… someone full of wisdom, complexly handsome, reliable for good lines, quotable, whose memory gets stuck on certain obsessions, and who hopes that technology might just go away if one glowers darkly enough at it and never uses the i word. We’re kind of surprised that he’s still alive – we (including those who have never really spoken to him) are relieved and reassured by his being alive, even if he’s a bit daft and incomprehensible; alive, even if he lives mostly in a very small back room (subsidised scantily!) happy enough with his lot. We do feel the need to check in on him everysooften, and we’re baffled and charmed and sometimes shocked – appalled – at what he comes out with. The conviction! People keep publishing his obituary, but that’s poppycock. His pacemaker’s more reliable than the holes in his socks. A grandfather, in short. Pops.
  Q. What do you think is the most important technique in the writing of poetry?
  A. Finding one’s own voice, after a long apprenticeship in imitation. That’s not really a technique, sorry!
  Q. How long would you normally spend redrafting a poem before it is done?
  A. Three days to three months. Just once, three years. I do a lot of altering immediately after a poem’s writing, as if there is only a short window before the clay sets. I get into this semi-psychotic mode of closing the Word document, thinking that I’m done, but then immediately opening it again to reread the poem, and I end up working the clay smoother on one side, adding a bit of moisture here and there, disturbing the texture, then I close it again. Immediately, I re-open it – terrified at what I’ve committed to – and… pat pat pat. Then I usually go off to mark student assignments or, if I’m lucky, write prose, move countries, chop broccoli in a new way so that it might taste different, until another poem comes, and that might take a couple of months.
  Q. What advice would you give to a poet just starting out?
  A. Try to be inside the poem you’re working on while you’re working on it, but absolutely outside and distant from it when it’s done – unattached, in fact. The instinct when you’re starting out is to cling on to your first bits of writing (the first one or two years’ worth – I see it in students all the time) and you shouldn’t. It’s not fair to the writer you might become. There are all sorts of muscles of perception which you need to feed protein shakes and take out on long walks. You’ll know then, when you’ve written a real line, stanza, or gesture into existence – some observation that is your own, and that hasn’t been articulated yet.
  Q. Who were your literary influences growing up?
  A. I didn’t read novels until I was a teenager. By the time I remember (really) reading a novel, I’d already published a poem. (What a fraud!) I did read a lot of poetry and playtexts though. That had something to do with the books that were in the house; my being a very slow reader; and that novels seemed rude, scary and impermeable. Whereas poetry was unintimidating, and easy on the wrists. I felt that I was being treated as an adult by the poem, which was – pathetically – my favourite thing about childhood. I read whatever was going cheap at Charlie Byrnes’ Bookshop. Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Beckett, Yvengeny Yvetushenko, Larkin, Heaney, Kerouac, Brendan Kennelly, Neruda, all the playwrights… there was no rhyme or reason to my progression. Well, there was one of those things… On top of that, I avoided poetry courses during my English and Drama degree at Queen’s because I didn’t want to ruin poetry for myself (DAFT idea), so I continued to read poetry widely and randomly. It is terrific to have enormous discoveries to make still in my reading. Long may the growing up and being influenced continue!
  Q. Do you have an all time favourite poem or poet?
  A. I voted for Derek Mahon’s ‘A Disused Shed in County Wexford’ in the Poem for Ireland campaign. Yvetushenko’s ‘The Companion’ is a perfect poem, but I suspect its translations could be better. Don Paterson’s book Rain in any weather. I better not start on this… I love Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ for what it does to your mood, but I think there are truer poems, by which I mean less of an exercise in breaking ground. I have no authority to say such a thing! I like long lines. I’m hyperventilating. Don’t most people just say ‘Shakespeare’ here and move on?
  Q. What are you currently working on?
  A. I’m working on a new book of poems (I’m about a third/half of the way there) and a new novel. I write poems intermittently with prose, though I started out as a poet. I’ve written two other novels, one for practice (which formed part of my Ph.D) and one that’s got too much of the poem about it for capitalism. I suspect I’ll have the same issue with the novel I’m currently working on, called Orchid & the Wasp, but I’m trying to write the best book that I can. That’s always what I’m working towards.
  Q. Are you still living in New Zealand?
  A. I lived in New Zealand for seven years, but I moved to The Netherlands last September for a lectureship/Visiting Writer position at Maastricht University. I like to move around. It helps me deal with the cruelty of only being able to live one life.
  Q. Have you been to Listowel Writers’ Week before? What are you most looking forward to?
  A. I’ve never been, so I’m very excited to attend this year – particularly the Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín reading. I got my agent by pitching a book halfway between Enright’s The Gathering and Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, so she’s certainly been an influential writer! Nick Laird is great to hear live too. It’ll be nice to see that part of the country, after a good fifteen years.

• Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/08/05/632841570/in-orchid-and-the-wasp-an-unapologetic-heroine-who-s-no-gentle-flower

  Author Interviews
  < In 'Orchid And The Wasp,' An Unapologetic Heroine Who's No Gentle Flower August 5, 20188:29 AM ET Listen· 2:28 2:28 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST: There is a type of orchid that resembles a female wasp. And in rare occasions, this trick of nature will attract a male wasp to pollinate the flower. This is portrayed on the cover of Caoilinn Hughes' new book "Orchid And The Wasp," though the symbiotic relationship represents something else in Hughes' debut novel. CAOILINN HUGHES: So I was using this as a way to explore the relationship between the exploited and the exploiter and ask the question, is it really exploitation if the loser isn't aware of what they're losing? GARCIA-NAVARRO: The exploiter in "Orchid And The Wasp" is the book's heroine, Gael Foess, a young Irish woman who will do anything to get what she wants. Reviewers have called Gael despicable, three times smarter than everyone around her and ruthless. HUGHES: There are all these sorts of novels about men out in the world. And I wanted to write a novel about a woman out in the world. She's quite a macho character. I was really baffled and concerned by the fact that there don't seem to be many novels and even films or stories about women who aren't given kind of an element of trauma, who are unlikeable or ostensibly unlikable and who you see kind of succeed. Normally, if you have kind of unlikable female characters, they're given this measure of - this and this trauma is revealed in their past - and kind of apologizes for their unlikability or their bad behavior. So I really wanted to avoid going down that route. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Something that Gael doesn't apologize for? Her sexuality. The only person who pierces Gael's tough exterior is Harper, her college roommate. Gael falls in love with Harper, but Hughes doesn't label her or the relationship. HUGHES: Gael's sexuality - I wanted to avoid having to address that directly in the sense that it's part of the privilege of straight people not to have to address their sexuality. On the other hand, it is also a little bit tragic that you get this feeling when you read the book that because Gael understands the world quite cynically, she's aware of the fact that being in a relationship with a woman will take away some of her clout. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Despite Gael's cynicism, Hughes says this complex heroine does have a conscience. HUGHES: Her moral compass is kind of a plaything in her hand that, occasionally, she puts away and forgets where she left it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Caoilinn Hughes's new book is "Orchid And The Wasp."

Hughes, Caoilinn: ORCHID & THE WASP

Kirkus Reviews. (May 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Full Text:
Hughes, Caoilinn ORCHID & THE WASP Hogarth/Crown (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 10 ISBN: 978-1-5247-6110-3
A fast-talking young woman sets out to help her family at the height of Ireland's recession in this language-driven debut.
From a young age, Gael Foess is a hustler: ambitious, arrogant, and more capable than most adults. After her father walks out, Gael must care for her unusual family on her own. There's her mother, Sive, conductor for Ireland's National Symphony Orchestra, who struggles with an impenetrable depression and is largely distant toward her children, and Guthrie, Gael's holier-than-thou younger brother, who suffers seizures from a mental disorder that result in beautiful visions. While Sive and Guthrie each possess artistic genius they don't know how to spin into comfortable livelihoods, Gael's true talent lies in convincing unsuspecting strangers to believe the stories she weaves out of air. "The recession made it worse: the false-humility epidemic," thinks Gael. "But it's not enough for your relatives to know your worth. For your gifts to be put in a cabinet like ornamental photo frames, destined to tarnish." Instead, Gael wants her family to shine. She tries first to scam her way into London Business School, then steals her mother's compositions to solicit interest from orchestras around the world, and finally flies to New York at the height of the Occupy movement to sell a stunning set of Guthrie's paintings. When a trendy gallery shows interest but requires more paintings to secure a show, Gael hires an artist to forge her brother's work. This is both Gael's crowning achievement and a move that isolates her from her loved ones. For a novel with a con-artist heroine, Hughes' debut is oddly quiet and language-focused. Most of the action takes place off-stage or in long passages of dialogue relayed well after the fact. But Hughes delivers a compelling exploration of what it means to create art, skewering the arbitrary restrictions of art-world gatekeepers along the way. At the emotional heart of this book lies a darker question, though: What does it mean to make a performance of your own life, in service of your family, when the cost might be to lose them forever?
As strange, musical, and carefully calculated as its unusual heroine.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hughes, Caoilinn: ORCHID & THE WASP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538294002/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=82c061fc. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A538294002

Orchid & the Wasp

Publishers Weekly. 265.21 (May 21, 2018): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Full Text:
Orchid & the Wasp
Caoilinn Hughes. Hogarth, $26 (352p) ISBN 9781-5247-6110-3
The freewheeling first novel by Irish poet Hughes (Gathering Evidence) is dominated more by character than plot, but the determined, daring central character is worthy of the spotlight. The episodic narrative follows Gael from the age of 11, when a scandalous business proposal to her fellow classmates at a Catholic school (to market fake blood capsules for the purpose of faking virginity) gets her invited to "take her depraved influence elsewhere," through to age 20, when she returns to Ireland after an eventful few months in New York City. With a symphony conductor mother, a financier father, and a pious yet troubled younger brother, Gael has family drama to spare. Fond of both art and money, she concocts a scheme to scam the New York art market. While there, she gets involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The book bounces from one extended passage in its heroine's life to another, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps. While the other characters don't have Gael's depth, a few emerge from the crowd. These include Gael's sensitive brother, Guthrie, who is more resilient than he first appears; he'r London Business School roommate and potential love interest, Harper; and Wally, the wealthy codger with whom Gael spars on the flight to New York. Hughes's breezy approach, clear love of language, and endearingly flawed central character contribute enough charm to compensate for a not entirely credible plot. Agent: BillClegg, the Clegg Agency. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Orchid & the Wasp." Publishers Weekly, 21 May 2018, p. 40. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012567/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5f3d9bdc. Accessed 18 Sept. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A541012567

• RTE
  https://www.rte.ie/culture/2018/0807/983573-review-orchid-and-the-wasp-by-caoilinn-hughes/
  Word count: 746

  Review: Orchid and the Wasp by Caoilinn Hughes
  Updated / Wednesday, 8 Aug 2018 18:43

  0

  Caoilinn Hughes: definitely one to watch, say Grace Keane

  By Grace Keane
  Freelance journalist & RTÉ Culture book critic

  Reviewer score

  Audience score

  7 Votes

  Publisher
  Bloomsbury, paperback

  Orchid and the Wasp brings us the singular Gael Foess from early pubescence up to young adulthood and her life in the Celtic tiger bubble- the boom and the crash and her ambition to make the most of it all.
  An enigmatic and vivacious personality, Gael Foess grabs readers by the hand and drags them through her wandering life. Raised by career-focused and somewhat absent parents, Gael is introduced at an early age to the concept of making sacrifices in order to get ahead. Her disgraced banker father, Jarlath - who helped bankrupt the country in 2008 - flees to the UK, abandoning Gael and her younger brother Guthrie to the whims of their flighty mother, Sive, a conductor with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Sive is so consumed by career she neglects the dutius of motherhood. Meanwhile, Gale’s younger brother Guthrie is epilepetic.
  We first encounter the headstrong Gael at the age of 11 in the schoolyard, promoting her first commercial business endeavor, virginity pills, as in pills that facilitate losing one's virginity. Gael's classmates are not on the same page and she is sent home from school. Ultimately she feels she possesses aptitudes beyond her years - attempting to drive her father’s car, when she is not yet a teenager.
  Gael’s disgraced banker father, Jarlath - yes, he too helped bankrupt the country in 2008 - flees to the UK, abandoning Gael and her younger brother Guthrie to the whims of their flighty mother, Sive, a conductor with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Consumed by career, Sive neglects the duties of motherhood. Gale’s younger brother Guthrie is epileptic.
  In this unorthodox family, Gael sees herself as carer and parent to both her mother and brother, even as she travels to London and New York in a bid to make her fortune.
  The irony is that in her bid to protect her vulnerable family members from the cruelty and greediness of people such as her father, she must herself embody the exact same conduct. Gael has no qualms about lying, over-embellishing and blagging her way into various scenarios where she has no right to be and it's hugely amusing to see her do it.

  I wish I could be as ballsy and supremely confident as Gael, even if it more often than not doesn’t actually work in her favor. The star of the novel is her protagonist, the secondary characters are a platform for Gael to bounce off and continue on her own adventures. Art, music and creativity are all crucial themes in the novel and the writing isn't afraid to both poke fun and stand in awe of it. At what stage is a painting a fantastic piece of truly moving artwork or something to make money with? Can you have one without the other? Is it the confidence behind an artwork that convinces its audience of its magnificence, rather than evident talent?
  Orchid and the Wasp is a hugely entertaining novel full of wit, intellect and sharp observations. Reading about a young female character who is not beset by the stereotypical problems that beset a person her age is refreshing and kudos to Caoilinn Hughes for doing so.
  I really do hope we see the return of Gale in a sequel of some kind. Akin to Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends, Orchid and the Wasp is a modern female coming-of- age story for a modern Irish audience. Dare I say it I enjoyed Caoilinn’s version of the tale much more than Rooney’s - Caoilinn Hughes is definitely one to watch.
  Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish writer, currently living in the Netherlands, where she is Visiting Writer at Maastricht University. Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet Press 2014), won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in manuscript form and The Irish Times Strong/Shine Award (2015) in book form. It was also shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection, the Royal Society of NZ Science Book Prize, the NZ Post Books Award for Poetry and the Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers' Week.

• Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/orchid-and-the-wasp-by-caoilinn-hughes-this-year-s-conversations-with-friends-1.3520077
  Word count: 996

  ‘Orchid and the Wasp’ by Caoilinn Hughes: this year’s ‘Conversations with Friends’
  Review: What’s that? It’s the sound of marching coming over the hill of Irish fiction

  Caoilinn Hughes casts her unique gaze, her artistic, analytical and emotional intelligence, on us, not just in Ireland, but our capitalist world
  Paul McVeigh
  Sat, Jun 9, 2018, 06:00

  First published:
  Sat, Jun 9, 2018, 06:00

  Buy Now

  Book Title:
  Orchid and the Wasp
  ISBN-13:
  978-1786073655
  Author:
  Caoilinn Hughes
  Publisher:
  Oneworld
  Guideline Price:
  £12.99
  Caoilinn Hughes has, until now, been best known as a poet. Orchid and the Wasp, her debut novel, has caused a stir both sides of the Atlantic. It has landed on these shores with impressive literary wings and endorsements from, among others, Pulitzer-winning Anthony Doerr, who called Hughes “a massive talent”. He’s not wrong.
  Orchid and the Wasp is an ambitious debut. It is set in Dublin, London and New York, tackles global economics (from the death of the Celtic Tiger to Occupy Wall Street) and not afraid to riff on the art world and classical music. There’s a lot packed into this meaty feast and, inevitably, some strands are more satisfying than others. It won’t please everyone. But, here’s to ambition.
  It begins with our anti-hero, Gael, convincing her primary school peers to lose their virginity while she plans to profit from it. I wasn’t convinced by this precocious child and was nervous of what lay ahead. At the end of chapter one, Gael watches her father masturbate in the shower (nothing sexually abusive) and chats to him after, while he dries himself off. It is to Hughes’s credit that this memorable scene works and is not as sensational as it sounds in the retelling. I saw an author’s voice emerging. The tuning fork struck here sets a sexualised, if not sexual, tone that then sadly fades out. When sex does appear in the novel, particularly the exploration of sexuality with her university housemate and love interest, Harper, the encounters and the prose fizz. It’s not often you read an author who is so good at writing about sex and sexuality you wish the novel had a lot more.
  Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples review
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  The Dark Dark review: vibrant renditions of people on the brink
  Small Victories: The True Story of Faith No More review
  The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith review
  I felt similarly about Gael’s relationship with her father, Jarleth; the everything-that’s-wrong-with-the-world capitalist, a terrible husband and father who abandons his family and sends it into a severe emotional and financial decline. The scenes between the two, and their relationship, are some of the most exciting in the book and his disappearance early on (and absence for most of the novel) is an unfortunate wasted pleasure.
  Weaker characters
  We are left following Gael’s relationship with her damaged brother Guthrie, who has epileptic fits with no medical cause, and her composer mother, Sive, who goes into a depression, losing her job as a semi-famous orchestra conductor. When the novel focused on these characters, the pace, and my interest, dipped. Sive’s character arc – the stint working at a cash converter’s and her transformation from the unfeeling, neglectful mother and obsessive artist to a redemptive mother hen figure at the community orchestra – didn’t convince me. Guthrie’s plotline is overly dramatic. I don’t want to spoil the reveals, but the joys of this novel are not to be found in plotting, nor in the emotional impact of its characters. And there’s a lot here to enjoy.
  The novel really hits its stride when Gael sheds these two, during her stint at university, and later when she hits New York. Hughes has created something special in Gael, who is her own woman in a way we don’t see often enough in books: brave, complex, fractured, intelligent, resourceful, ruthless and unforgiving (I could go on) while prepared to do anything, at any cost, to help the ones she loves. Gael makes it her life’s work to protect her exploitable loved ones from her father and wider society, but in her attempt to save them she becomes, and is seen by them as, someone they need to be protected from.
  The new new guard
  There’s the sound of marching coming from over the hill of Irish fiction. What was the new guard may find that it’s not leading the charge any more. Authors such as Sally Rooney (and I’d say Orchid and the Wasp is this year’s Conversations with Friends) and now Caoilinn Hughes, have an eye on Ireland but not the Irish eye we’re used to seeing through and Irish voice we are used to hearing. Middle and upper-middle-class protagonists and concerns predominate, and the prose is philosophical and intellectual, often with artistic or academic themes, where, without the author telling you, often you wouldn’t know which country the character or narrator was from. Like a New Yorker Irish voice, urbane, mid/cross-Atlantic, effortlessly cool and international, no longer small-town underbelly outcast.
  If you judge a novel by whether or not you want to read more, then Orchid and the Wasp wins for me. It’s not a perfect novel but it is ambitious, full-bodied and fresh. Hughes casts her unique gaze, her artistic, analytical and emotional intelligence, on us, not just in Ireland, but our capitalist world and the personal, political and social ramifications implicit in our acquiescence to, or indeed, championing of, its values. Bring Gael back, please.
  Paul McVeigh is author of The Good Son (Salt Publishing), winner of the Polari Prize