Ordinary Human Failings is an ingenious novel that masks its significance in its format. It starts out with what seems to be the makings of a sensational tabloid story, and its narrative framework follows  the attempt of journalist Tom Hargreaves to extract that story from the family that’s likely to be responsible for it. His efforts consist of sequestering the family at a comfortable but out-of-the-way hotel in North London, and plying them with drink (if they’ll have it) until they tell him what he wants to know. But they never do, while at the same time the murder charge at the heart of the whole thing evaporates. Tom is left with nothing; there is no sensational story. Instead, there is the actuality of weakness and disappointment — and hope. too — as the members of the clan tell their stories, which are far from malignant, and only too human.

There are four people in the Green family, although the youngest, ten year-old Lucy, has been brought into police custody as the possible, indeed likely, murderer of a three year-old girl living in the same council estate. There is Carmel, Lucy’s mother. There is Richie, Carmel’s half-brother. And there is John, the father of both of them. In the background lurks the ghost of Rose Green, whose recent death appears to have deprived the others of the family’s cohesion.

The blighting of Carmel’s teen-aged hopes is the reason for the family’s living in London. Rose brought her daughter over from Waterford to obtain an abortion, but by the time she discovered that Carmel was pregnant, it was too late to do anything about it. Carmel refused to return to Ireland, so Rose summoned her husband and stepson.

We learn that Carmel was not foolish to fall in love with a thoughtful and good-natured young man who nurtured her intelligence. Hers was not  the tale of the silly girl seduced by a villain. No; it is not that old story. Rather,

It felt to them both that she had skipped some essential moment. She had gone from never having a boyfriend, only a few tepid kisses with nobodies, to the strange emotional sophistication she seemed now to inhabit. She had missed in a pivotal stage of agonizing and awkwardness which usually characterized early liaisons, straight to the strikingly adult  frankness she was addressing him with now. (68)

She studies for exams at his flat.

She sat up in his bed with the books in her lap and cupped her hands to shield her eyes from his body. His body lay the other way, feet up beside her and head and dangling off the edge of the mattress. He held a novel aloft to read from. They had come to this arrangement to minimize the chance of them distracting one another. When she suggested that she just study at home if they weren’t going to really be together on these nights, he looked offended and she loved him for it. She knew herself why it was worth it, why they couldn’t waste the chance to be near each other even when they couldn’t speak or touch. (72)

But however nice, he is not extraordinary; he jumps at the chance to take a better job in Dublin, and he leaves her shortly before she finds out that he has also left the worst sort of souvenir. The new life inside her becomes the tomb of all her shining hopes.

The stories of her half-brother, Richie, and her father, John, are not so heartbreaking, but both have been struck by disappointments so severe that they have simply given up any plans for doing more than getting through the day. Richie, as a weak but not insensible drunk, has been his own disappointment.

The year elapsed and still nothing happened to suggest a course of action. He was surprised that no event had occurred to shape the future, but not unduly alarmed. (121)

John has been more than disappointed — shocked — first by an industrial accident that cost him the use of an arm and then by the desertion of his first wife. It does not take long for Tom Hargreaves to outrage him.

That was what sex had done to him, to his life, to his family. And now this newspaper fellow sat there wanting to shoot the breeze about how it all worked? He was asking and asking about Lucy’s father, asking about Richie and Carmel sharing a room. What was he getting at? They shared a room because there were only the two bedrooms. He tried to explain the layout of the house to him, he was telling him facts about the condition the place was in when he first bought it, he was saying he would love to get back over to it, and he spoke this way until he was asleep and snoring. (171)

What makes these stories interesting rather than pathetic is the tellers’ awareness of consciousness, which is often an uncertainty about how far it reaches, both in themselves and in the other members of the family, or, in Tom’s case, plain awareness of other people. Again and again, they are aware of not knowing how far consciousness, their own or another’s reaches.

Here is Carmel:

She realized with a spark of quick shame that she did not have an intuitive sense of what level of cognition Lucy was operating under when it came to such matters. (108)

Here is Richie:

That system lasted a while, until he had been in London a year and it became clear that the fresh start had been no such thing and none of his attempts to make a life for himself had been, or were going to be, successful. (101)

Here is Tom:

He wanted to approach Richie in the spirit of peers, lads together, but didn’t know what his levels of sensitivity were. (111)

And Tom with Carmel:

She told him, astonishing herself, speaking things aloud she never had before, things she had scarcely even thought in the privacy of her own head before.

He listened as she described the way that her mind had split neatly in two between what actually was, and what she was capable of tolerating, and how the false part had taken over and dominated the other for those months. There were details he didn’t understand, logistics, about how she could take steps to hide her body from others to conceal the situation while also not actually acknowledging the situation to herself. (178-9)

What these characters do seem to know is that they do not know where their awareness — call it cognition, if you will — shades into true consciousness. “Self-consciousness,” and “self-awareness” are inadequate terms, because they involve self-alienation, self-departure, in the way that people try to leave themselves during trauma in order to escape terrible pain. The terrible pain in Ordinary Human Failings is that of being surrounded by intimates who are actually strangers, starting with oneself. This is the root of the fictional enterprise.

At the end, Tom Hargreaves gives up on his story and sends the family away. They return to their native Waterford, where it is possible to find out what they need to know, or at least some of it, and the catastrophe that propelled the family out of Ireland can be redeemed within it.