In Claire Keegan’s “long short story” Foster (2008), the unnamed child protagonist-narrator is temporarily displaced to the home of distant relatives to ease the burden of her feckless father and pregnant mother who are overrun with other children to care for.1 In an early scene, the narrator’s new foster mother, Mrs. Kinsella, gives the child a bath. The child thinks, “Her hands are like my mother’s hands, but there is something else in them, too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place and new words are needed” (Keegan 2008: 18). Though Keegan’s text is not mentioned in The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable (2020), the child protagonist’s “loss for words” in this intimate scene recalls the experiences of so many of the child characters at the center of the fictions in Joseph Valente’s and Margot Gayle Backus’s study: an inability to put into words something they have witnessed or endured. In the foreword to The Child Sex Scandal, the widely known Irish cultural critic Fintan O’Toole discusses the role of writing in the process of uncovering things that are unspeakable, particularly when those things involve children. O’Toole explains that “in life, much of what children know is communicated between them only in quiet speech—the unspeakable is really the unwritable. In art, it is writing that occupies the place of this speech, that broaches, more or less explicitly, what is not being said, either by the young characters themselves or by the world around them” (xiv). Listening closely to “what is not being said” is the impetus for this study, and Backus and Valente—two key players in the field of Irish literary studies—attempt to unearth the “unspeakable” narratives of child sexual abuse in a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century short stories and novels by some of Ireland’s most studied writers.Backus and Valente begin their preface by identifying what they see as a subgenre of modern Irish writing in which authors figure sex scandals and taboo sexuality through the eyes of children. Backus and Valente coin this subgenre “literature of scandal” (xviii) and argue that texts that fall within this category “plac[e] the reader in the position of an uninitiated child experiencing something both horrible and compelling that she cannot comprehend but that the reader can.” The interaction between reader and text is a key element of Backus and Valente’s theorizations. The “reader” that Backus and Valente concern themselves with is, at some points in the study, the “Irish reading public” (23) who reflexively situate their interpretation of literary texts in relationship to public discourse on factual child sex scandals and child imperilment. At other points, the “reader” that they focus on is the critic of these fictions who, in their assessment, has often failed to fully theorize the child abuse figured in the texts in question because of a collective resistance to the troubling “traumatic enjoyment” (34) of abuse experienced by many of the child characters. The child narrators see things that adults are “socialized not to see,” and therefore signal to adult readers that “there is ‘something missing’ that both child and reader must interpret in order to make sense of the narrative as a whole” (2).In the introduction, Backus and Valente situate the “literature of scandal” in the Irish sociohistorical context by tracing how “the British trope of child imperilment took on a new and socially decisive form in early twentieth-century Ireland” (xix). The trope’s evolution owes itself to the growing attention paid by Irish newspapers to child imperilment, attention sparked by the tightening grip of Catholic nationalist ideologies. This developing “moral episteme” resulted in a “newly unified church-media-government complex” that took as a primary concern a “caste of culpable children whose corruption posed a threat to Ireland’s inherent purity” (18). Essential to their project is the authors’ argument that literature of child sex scandals engages directly with public media discourses about these kinds of scandals, establishing an interplay between Irish literary texts and other public modes of discourse. The introduction also begins to acquaint the reader with the theoretical underpinnings of the study. They primarily engage with French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s concept of the “enigmatic signifier: a constitutive psychic blind spot incurred in a child’s traumatic encounter with adult sexuality” (quoted in Valente and Backus 3). According to Laplanche, because the traumatic encounter can be neither “integrated nor dismissed” it is received by the child as both “unbearably shameful and ecstatically pleasurable.” Their Laplanchian lens allows for Backus and Valente to further establish how the texts at the center of their project replicate for their readers an “abstracted version” of the traumatic experience of their characters and, in turn, the texts “thereby place the reader alongside the protagonist, as it were, nudging us to supply the ‘metatheory’ that will confirm, correct, or elucidate the ‘fundamental theorization’ in the text” (36). According to Valente and Backus, these texts “serve as repositories of difficult, traumatic, and scandalous historical truths” (32) that can be revealed through rigorous psychoanalytic interpretation. This is of course a tall order for the everyday reader, but also for practiced literary scholars not working in the psychoanalytic tradition. While the volume takes as its subject literary texts that raise questions about widespread scandal and abuse carried out on Irish individuals, the meticulous theoretical approach does, at times, elide the wide range of voices from activists, cultural theorists, and, importantly, survivors of abuse, who continue to address Ireland’s ongoing culture of scandal.James Joyce’s oeuvre is rife with scenes of sexual initiations of children and whispers of deviant sexuality shared between his characters. It is no surprise, then, that Backus and Valente begin their project in chapter 1 by analyzing these seductions in Dubliners (1914) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Their reading of Joyce’s fictions is framed by the political downfall of Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, whose affair with a married woman was thrust into the public eye officially when her husband, another member of parliament, filed for divorce. Backus and Valente argue that as a consequence of the elected official’s publicized sexual impropriety, “a psychic and social mandate to misrecognize [sexual scandals] was broadly constitutive of adult civic subjectivity in post-Parnellite nationalist circles” (44). Joyce’s use of ellipses in the beginning of “The Sisters” (1914) is illustrative of this “misrecognition” and offers a lucid example of the detailed close reading that the scholars practice. When two characters discuss the death of a priest and his suspect relationship with the child narrator, a moment of ellipsis points less than covertly to the “open secret” of the priest’s deviant sexuality and pedophilic relationship with the child narrator. The open secret, the “staple of cultural scandal” (53), serves to acknowledge without fully articulating child sexual abuse and also signals a broader complicity of Irish culture in child sexual scandal. Joyce’s fictions, however, seek to bring the reality of child sexual abuse to consciousness and “impose on scandal observers—all of us in sum—an ethical mandate to overcome those very pressures and treat the scandal of child sexual abuse as our collective responsibility” (70).Backus and Valente’s readings of Kate O’Brien’s The Land of Spices (1941) and Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960), in chapters 2 and 3 respectively, respond to what they see as the “ongoing reticence in Irish literary criticism concerning what is, manifestly, a cornucopia of deviant desires, episodes, and identities in modern Irish literature” (76). It should be noted, though, that this claim overlooks scholarship by Tina O’Toole (2013), Kathryn Conrad (2004), Patrick Mullen (2012), and most recently José Carregal (2021) (some of whom Backus and Valente themselves cite elsewhere in the monograph). They, among others, offer a multitude of literary and cultural analyses concerned with what Irish culture has historically framed as nonnormative desires. That oversight admitted, Backus and Valente do offer new perspectives on certain critical gaps. Extending their discussion of the “open secret” (81) in Joyce’s writing to Kate O’Brien’s novel, they suggest that literary critics of the female homoeroticism that pervades the novel have been silent about the conditions of this open secret. Reading The Land of Spices as a semi-autobiographic novel, the authors highlight Kate O’Brien’s linkage of her main character’s aesthetic pleasure and her same-sex erotic desires. They argue, “[by] way of underscoring the importance of these lesbian impulses to her specifically aesthetic development, O’Brien places the moments of their appearance in illustrative parallelism with incidents from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist” (94). Fleshing out the complex relationship between aesthetic and erotic pleasures functions as a major part of Backus and Valente’s project.The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature makes visible Valente and Backus’s process of thoughtfully peeling back the edges of significant texts in the Irish canon. This precise work offers new ways of reading the child characters featured in the texts at hand. Since its infamous publication, Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls (1960) has held a special place in Irish literary scholarship primarily for feminist critics. Since critical analyses of the fraught relationship between the main character Caithleen Brady and her friend Baba Brennan abound, it was refreshing to be surprised with a new interpretation of the “symbolic position” (110) that Baba assumes in Caithleen’s psyche. The abuse to which Caithleen is subjected by her father is later reenacted in her relationship with Baba. Backus and Valente argue that “the parallelism of Baba to Mr. Brady [Caithleen’s father] is manifold and conspicuous” (111) and offers a symbolic linkage between these two characters who have for the most part been read by scholars as distinct. Ultimately, Caithleen’s “compulsion to repeat as well as repair the unconscious sexual elements of her family trauma . . . leaves her prey to a series of likewise abusive yet socially approved paternal surrogates” (xx).Backus and Valente are skilled practitioners of psychoanalytic literary analysis as evidenced in their prose. As such, this is a difficult read not only for its grave subject matter but also its complex theoretical lexicon. Applying psychoanalytic readings to literature of scandal for the purposes of “illuminating, simultaneously, the cultural dynamic of child sex scandal in modern Ireland and the specific role of modern and contemporary Irish novels in responding to and participating in this dynamic” (131) inevitably encounters the difficulty of aligning lived experiences of trauma with academic discourse. Reading the book, and especially the first half, I found it difficult to quiet an uneasy question: “What would a survivor of child sexual abuse in Ireland think of these theorizations?” Certainly, this is a problem systemic to all academic discourse that attempts to consider the relationship between literary representations of trauma and traumatic lived experience. In the second half of the volume, Backus and Valente attempt to address this problem by bringing into play literary representations of child sex scandals and actual events that mesmerized the Irish public.Backus and Valente’s critique of the interplay among Irish Catholic nationalism, institutional power, and sexual abuse in the first three chapters is vivid, though in comparison to the latter part of the book, the analysis occurs in broader brushstrokes. The second half of the study benefits from a more sustained discussion of a specific child sex scandal that captured the attention of much of the Irish populace in the early 1990s: the X Case. The X Case encompasses a series of legal battles surrounding a fourteen-year-old girl who, with her parents, traveled to London to obtain an abortion after she was repeatedly raped and eventually impregnated by a family friend. When her parents contacted Irish authorities for information about obtaining DNA evidence with the hope of convicting their daughter’s rapist, they were ordered to return to Ireland where Girl X was barred from travel and put on a 24-hour suicide watch by the state to prevent harm to herself and the fetus. Tracing the X Case as an enigmatic signifier throughout Keith Ridgway’s The Long Falling (1998), Backus and Valente reiterate a principal goal of their project, that is, to “delineate the distinguishing structure of a specifically literary or aesthetic . . . response to Ireland’s child sexual scandal” (133). They argue that literary texts “deploy enigmatic signifiers in two dimensions simultaneously: for the characters in the narrative and for the consumers of the narrative.” In particular, the writers see the main character of Ridgway’s novel, Grace, in many ways as an analog for X, though the character embodies key differences. By consciously and unconsciously confronting public discourse and news reporting on the X Case, “Grace simultaneously offers herself as a savior for X, restoring her from scandal object to innocent victim, and as a scapegoat for the nation-state that victimized X in the first place” (160). This complex interchange between child scandal and literary response unveils not only the narrative threads of scandal within the texts, but also the “irreducible linkage between scandal observer and participant” (132).In chapter 5, Backus and Valente continue their discussion of the X case to examine the role of childhood trauma in contemporary Ireland through Tana French’s mystery novel In The Woods (2007). By including their analysis of a text by French, the authors join a growing cohort of Irish studies scholars who aim to broaden the borders of academic scholarship by giving serious critical attention to texts that blur the boundary between popular genre fiction and “the novel of manners” (179). In reading French’s detective novel about the investigation into a child murder that took place not far from the site where, over thirty years earlier, two children mysteriously disappeared in the woods, Backus and Valente usefully add to their psychoanalytic framework scholarship conducted with a justice-oriented methodology. They borrow from James M. Smith’s (2007) influential study of the systemic abuse of women and children in Ireland’s state- and church-run institutions—which Smith deems Ireland’s “architecture of containment” (xxi)—to “examine the psychopathology of everyday Irish life.” Drawing attention to French’s method of layering crimes on top of each other, Backus and Valente once again illustrate the dynamic between literary text and “citizen-subject” (193). They argue that “In The Woods reenacts the formation of community in violence, specifically the movement of a mythical state of universalized but unconstrained childhood or immaturity to the establishment of permanent bonds among citizen-subjects connected by guilt and sublimation.”Throughout the study, Backus and Valente attempt to illustrate how a “rigorously psychoanalytic critical lens makes evident the specific and indispensable contribution Irish literature has made to Irish society’s now-ongoing reckoning” (xix) with child sex scandals and endemic abuse in modern Ireland. As part of this work, they address what they see as “glaring blind spots” (142) in the critical conversations on the texts they analyze. In the case of Ridgway’s The Long Falling, for example, they offer their reading of an overlooked “primal scene” in which Grace’s son Sean falls into a ditch and drowns to death. Their most direct rerouting of the scholarly discourse on a text comes in the final chapter and epilogue. In the final chapter, they explore “the enigma of sexual violence” (196) in Anne Enright’s Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007). The novel is narrated by Veronica Hegarty who is called on to travel from Ireland to retrieve her brother Liam’s dead body after it is found on the shore in Brighton, England. The narrative intersperses Veronica’s narration of the time following Liam’s death and flashbacks to memories from when Liam and she were young. Enright’s novel hinges on one of Veronica’s particular memories, when she and Liam were living with their grandmother Ada and a family friend sexually abused Liam, and possibly Veronica herself, when Liam was nine and she was eight. Though the novel has garnered much critical attention since its publication, Backus and Valente take issue with what they see as the “singlemindedness of the [novel’s] critical tradition” (199). Much of the scholarship fits within a “trauma theory paradigm” that addresses the effects of the trauma at the center of the novel, but “has so far failed to reckon in a sustained, conceptually rigorous fashion with the particulars of the trauma delineated” (200). They suggest that critics have shirked from addressing Veronica’s sexualization of children, most notably overlooking the “pedophilic flavor” (228) of her first meeting with Liam’s son, Rowan, as well as her “suggestively carnal” (229) interactions with her own children. They suggest further that the novel’s “traumatic primal scene”—in which Veronica witnesses her brother’s abuse—serves as an enigmatic signifier and “demonstrates how the repetitive enactment endemic to traumatic subjectivity passes from one generation to another” (229). This critical move is perhaps the moment in which they mirror most clearly the authors whose texts they analyze. By framing Veronica not only as a sympathetic witness and potential survivor of child sexual abuse but also as a psychically pedophilic actor, Backus and Valente put into words what we as readers would prefer to remain unspoken. It is easier for readers to sympathize with Veronica—the grieving woman who witnessed her brother’s abuse and his subsequent unraveling—than to confront her role in perpetuating a culture of child sexual abuse.In their final move, Backus and Valente offer an epilogue that pays careful attention to a minor character in The Gathering, Uncle Brendan, who was institutionalized at St. Ita’s for a mental disability. Though “material and symbolic connections between the fates of Liam and Brendan” have prompted readers of the novel to view Brendan’s institutionalization as another point of Enright’s emphasis on collective remembrance of Ireland’s abused and abjected citizens, Backus and Valente urge us to see Uncle Brendan’s fate as embedded in, yet distinct from, accounts and evidence of child sexual abuse that have prompted Ireland’s “open and public retrospective sorrow and remorse” (236). Instead, in highlighting Uncle Brendan’s fate—buried among other St. Ita’s residents in an anonymous mass grave—“Enright’s novel respects, by acknowledging, the stubborn reality of inequitable mourning” (239). While child sexual abuse in Ireland has inspired public outcry and international attention, the authors remind readers that survivors of abuse who do not fit into the category of “child sex victims of respectable and relatable middle-class families” (238) should also be remembered and accounted for.The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable offers Irish studies a more expansive understanding of modern and contemporary Irish literary texts, many of which have served as hallmarks of discussion in the field for decades. In employing Laplanche’s figuration of the enigmatic signifier, Backus and Valente open new avenues for confronting representations of child sexual abuse in Ireland and the role that literary texts have played in enabling its excavation. The gift of new readings of widely and long-discussed narratives highlights the value of the psychoanalytic methodology that the authors employ, making this contribution particularly useful to scholars interested in psychoanalytic literary methodologies and those invested in innovating in the field of trauma theory. The study’s attention to the interaction between literature and its audiences, as well as the media’s role in shaping literary responses to scandal, make this a valuable resource for media studies as well.To be sure, the volume illustrates the ways that literature and life interact—literary productions and the way they are read by scholars and casual readers alike can shape and be shaped by public life. Yet, the question that I pose above still stands: “What would a survivor of child sexual abuse in Ireland think of these theorizations?” Perhaps a variant of this question is also fitting: “What would the parent of a child survivor of sexual abuse think about a study of child abuse that dares to consider enjoyment and pleasure?” Backus and Valente do address this point, suggesting in their reading of Liam’s abuse in The Gathering, that “this is by no means to suggest, let us be clear, that the child unconsciously ‘wants it’ or that the sexual predator is merely taking advantage of an always already latent wish” (201). And I do not suggest otherwise. Still, I question the ethics of a critical methodology that has the effect of distancing the realities of actual humans so far out of view that this statement would need to be made in the first place. Irish studies needs scholars to confront the cultural conditions under which literary texts are produced, but that can only be done ethically by keeping in view the lives and experiences of those who our work attempts to theorize. Emilie Pine’s recent book The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Irish and International Theatre (2020) offers a valuable model for this kind of social-justice oriented work, albeit in the genre of theater rather than fiction. The overarching accomplishment of The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature is its true collaborative form. This text offers a standout example of the opportunities for rich discovery to be had through collaborative scholarship, which I hope to see more of in the field in the future.