A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride – review

This account of Irish girlhood is an instant classic, says Anne Enright

About a third of the way in, I was discussing this book with my husband, who asked: "So is the author a genius or is she just very good?" "Well, she is definitely a genius," I said. "But I don't know how good she is, yet."

"Genius" was always a term that contained arguments about art and order and the relationship of the writer to society – whether he (there were no female contenders) was sacrifice or magus, mad artist or Great Novelist. There may be another argument here, if we had time to unpack it, about modernism and the rise of the middle classes. These days the middle classes are in decline and the term has gone out of fashion, though we still retain the sense of the genius as someone who is brilliantly "beyond"; who breaks the rules and plays the edge.

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