David O'Meara's ​Chandelier

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Nightwood Editions, 2024)

All the way through David O’Meara’s debut novel Chandelier, I was waiting for the light fixture. But instead of glass and beading, I found three individuals navigating dark passages in their lives.

He first introduces readers to a young woman who is preparing to teach English in South Korea, then a middle-aged man who has travelled to Barcelona and is reflecting on his architecture career, and, finally, a middle-aged woman revisiting a neglected family cottage in the Laurentians to assess its market value for sale.

None exists in familiar surroundings, so readers meet these characters when they are unmoored, their ordinary, day-to-day routines suspended. Their responses are key to character development—whether they perceive limitations or possibilities—and collectively reflect a pervasive sense of isolation. Specifically, the kind of loneliness that can proliferate in relationships with the greatest potential for intimacy.

The geographic settings are swiftly established through the kind of casual detail that suggests familiarity. Persimmon tea, monks chanting, beef hof: we’re in Korea. Wrought iron walk-ups and smoky brasseries: we’re on Saint-Laurent and Saint-Denis in Montreal. But these characters also seek the familiar even when they’re far from home, so even in Bahrain, they might order McDonalds to be delivered to the hotel.

More significant are the psychological surroundings. How Georgia is affected by comments made by another English-as-a-second-language teacher in Korea, for instance. While out for drinks, he says that, “people who came to teach overseas fell into two categories: those looking for an adventure or those trying to escape.” The proliferation of binaries in Georgia’s experience reflects her relative inexperience, like the observation that Westerners there are either teachers or missionaries (which doesn’t eclipse the previous theory—members of either group could be adventurous or escapist).

It feels appropriate that Georgia’s portion of the narrative obliquely refers to characters’ efforts to situate themselves. The young teachers’ insecurities, their uncertainty about where they’re headed, are clearly expressed: “They found a map. It didn’t help with any reality, only general scale, gazing over their life from a projected height, the roads into pink cities, the coastlines and green summits marked with a cross.”  But one of the other narrators reflects on maps in more detail, observing that people “do not want adventure in our transition points. We don’t want interplay. We want ninety-degree turns and clear signage.” And the other muses on the sense of powerlessness that erupts when we are living life on the margins: “Why would anyone pine for exile once you’d escaped it?”

Thematically, this trio is connected by their search for meaning, their capacity to read the signs and respond appropriately. The concrete connections between them emerge at a point in the story which satisfies readers’ curiosity without eclipsing their presence as individuals. And it affords the opportunity for abundant irony: comments made by one of them, about another, reveal an absence of understanding and familiarity, which is clearer than if readers been introduced to each narrator in the context of those inter-relationships.

Nonetheless, the novel’s preoccupation is not with disconnection but connection. Interwoven into the story are links in conversations and observations, which underscore the idea that people are bound by more similarities than differences. The architect, for instance, appreciates the “Faux Ireland coziness” of a pub in the airport, with pictures of James Joyce on the walls, whereas another character glimpses a poster advertising that airport pub. O’Meara seems to be saying that we are all moving through the same world, each of us the main character in our own small story.

These characters are flawed and their outlooks fractured; readers recognize, usually through observing them in interactions with other people who either know or seek to know them, that their burdens of loss and disappointment have compromised their present-day relationships. One notes of another, “She’s a puzzle, difficult, always fighting everything.” However, “she” could have made the same observation of either of the other two narrators. What feels unique to each narrator—for example, Georgia’s gratitude for the sense of suspension in travel, her sense of being suspended “there in a capsule of nightfall and fibreglass and steel”—is shared by all three (whether metaphorically or literally).

Each seeks a between-space, a liminal comfort or acceptance; each reflects on how or whether it’s elusive or achieved, or the turn they took (or might have taken) toward or away from it. “A little window there,” as the third narrator describes it. “Like how it’s good at Starbucks a few minutes before nine. When everyone’s left empty seats to get to work.” She says she’s “made a science of not standing in line” because “Waiting is exhausting.” But readers are invited to consider the difference between that sought-after sense of suspension and an endless sense of waiting, an unresolved limbo.
​
The final image of David O’Meara’s novel resides in a moment like this, in a lesser-known definition of “chandelier” which I found entirely unfamiliar and unexpectedly moving. But one which still encapsulates my original expectations of reflected and refracted bits of light, which is what I hope to find in a novel—an element of surprise that feels, in hindsight, inevitable. 

---

​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.