Notes from a Coma

Starred review from March 11, 2013
Perpetually luckless Irishman JJ O'Malley unexpectedly becomes an international celebrity when he volunteers for the "Somnos Project", a "penal experiment" to conduct research on the use of "deep coma as a future option in the EU prison system." O'Malley, since he lacks a prison record, serves as the experiment's control, joining four convicted men hooked up to monitors on a ship docked in the harbor of Killary in western Ireland, an inlet "suffused with ineffable sadness." Irish novelist McCormack (Getting it in the Head) employs the perspectives of five pivotal characters to recount O'Malley's life. An adoptee raised by a single father in rural Ireland, he's potentially a genius, yet sees himself untethered in the universe. After a tragic incident, O'Malley volunteers for the project and his loved ones struggle to understand his decision and the events that led to it. McCormack's substantial footnotes run in parallel to the narrative, serving as a primer on the nature of the experiment and helping progress the story in the present while the characters' accounts shed light on the subject's past. Subtle but haunting storytelling mixes with an insightful examination into the ethics of the penal system to produce an unusual and unforgettable read.

March 1, 2013
McCormack's well-received collection of satirical short stories Getting It In the Head (1998) heralded the arrival of a major talent in Irish fiction. His latest novel, already short-listed for the Irish Book of the Year Award, steps into a parallel dystopian European Union in recounting the fate of a Romanian orphan adopted by an unmarried farmer from county Mayo. Having grown up as an outsider in a rural Irish community as JJ O'Malley, his life is punctuated by a series of misfortunes culminating in his becoming an unwitting volunteer in an eerie experiment hatched by the EU's penal system. Instead of putting prisoners behind bars, the Somnos Project keeps them perpetually sedated in a virtual coma, hooked up to life support. As the world monitors their brainwave patterns on the Internet, JJ is annointed as a media darling. Using multiple narrators and continuous footnotes that present a documentary-style view of the skewed society he depicts, McCormack slyly and brilliantly satirizes, among many other things, our fixations with celebrity and high-priced medical technology.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)