Living lives

Abstract

This article argues that the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland 1994–2010 was a time of rapid social, cultural, and economic change. The certainties of an older world had disappeared, and new realities had to be confronted. This article focuses on three novels by Deirdre Madden – Authenticity (2002), Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008), and Time Present and Time Past (2013) – suggesting that each is a literary response to this moment of transformation. They can be read individually but are best understood as a triptych, offering a developing engagement with the link between art and a changing Ireland. Aligned with their meditation on private lives, these three novels are concerned with the nature of art and language and their relevance in the contemporary moment. Via painting in Authenticity, acting in Molly Fox’s Birthday, and photography in Time Present and Time Past, Madden probes how art, language, and the imagination respond to a world where they are now under serious pressure to perform and enact that rapid transformation into the future that underpins the Irish Celtic Tiger experience. Madden argues for an engaged art that is always born out of the everyday and the ordinary but aware of how strange and extraordinary that realm may actually be. Through art her characters come to know themselves and something of the world they live in.