Notes from a Coma
McCormack’s well-received collection of satirical short stories Getting It In the Head (1998) heralded the arrival of a major talent in Irish fiction. His latest novel, already short-listed for the Irish Book of the Year Award, steps into a parallel dystopian European Union in recounting the fate of a Romanian orphan adopted by an unmarried farmer from county Mayo. Having grown up as an outsider in a rural Irish community as JJ O’Malley, his life is punctuated by a series of misfortunes culminating in his becoming an unwitting volunteer in an eerie experiment hatched by the EU’s penal system. Instead of putting prisoners behind bars, the Somnos Project keeps them perpetually sedated in a virtual coma, hooked up to life support. As the world monitors their brainwave patterns on the Internet, JJ is annointed as a media darling. Using multiple narrators and continuous footnotes that present a documentary-style view of the skewed society he depicts, McCormack slyly and brilliantly satirizes, among many other things, our fixations with celebrity and high-priced medical technology. --Carl Hays