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Article: Whatever you say, say nothing ; With a change from her previous award-winning style, Hyland hopes to attract a new audience of nihilists
- Article from:
- Belfast Telegraph
- Article date:
- July 18, 2009
CopyrightCopyright 2009 Belfast Telegraph. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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There's something so devoid of emotion in MJ Hyland's protagonist
Patrick Oxtoby, and in the language with which she portrays his
voice, that there's a sense of doomed certainty about the very bad
things that are soon to happen.
Patrick is a 20-something college-dropout with a talent for
fixing cars. When his girlfriend breaks up with him, he suddenly
leaves his family home, his job and his town and takes the train to
a small town 100 miles away to try to start over.
Patrick lodges in a boarding house, where two other men his age
are boarding and gets a job with the local mechanic. But nothing
goes right. Hyland creates a suffocating bubble of inevitability
through the meticulous ...