The first thing that comes to mind in reviewing Milkman is that maybe I’m not smart enough to really get this novel? The New York Times reviewer didn’t much like it (called it a slog), but the New Yorker reviewer thought it was inventive and excellent. One reddit reviewer said “People either love it or they put it down after a short while because they find it unreadable.” 

I’m somewhere in the middle. I definitely didn’t love it, but I finished it—and at times it did feel unreadable.

It’s set in urban Northern Ireland (likely Belfast) in the 1970s and is filled with unspecific labels like renouncers, defenders, loyalists, over the water, the other religion, over the road, and paramilitary, to name a few. The characters are also unspecific: middle sister, wee sisters, maybe-boyfriend, third brother-in-law, milkman. 

What we know is that middle sister, the narrator, is an Irish Catholic girl of eighteen being pursued by milkman, a middle aged high level paramilitary guy who always knows her whereabouts, turning up out of nowhere while she’s running or walking while reading a book. He’s creepy, seemingly powerful, and while never touching her, suggests her maybe-boyfriend could die via a car bomb.  

In addition to no names, the writing is almost stream-of consciousness with the narrator rambling for pages (with few paragraph breaks) detailing very specific things like her maybe-boyfriend’s car part strewn house or the exact distance she and third-brother-in-law will run or the book she’s reading but then also very unspecific things like guns and and traitors and snipers and gossips. Rather than a linear story about The Troubles, we’re getting snippets and impressions.

And I guess all this is meant to convey a feeling of violence and fear and confusion within a suffocating community. The narrator’s only escape is through “nineteenth-century books because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century.”

That line, like many others, offers the dark humor side to the story. I probably missed a lot of it, but there is a funny element to the book as well. This might be brilliant writing (it won the 2018 Man Booker Prize), and maybe I’m just not patient or intellectual enough to fully appreciate what Burns is doing in this outside-the-box novel.