Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes

Rachel's Holiday Marian Keyes Book product page Rating:

I first read Rachel's Holiday waaaaay back in 2000, right after I started reading romance again (which is all V.'s fault; she was looking for a co-addict in her guilty pleasure).  I read Watermelon first, didn't like it much, then was blown away by Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married, then was dismayed to find nothing else Keyes on the library shelf.  Back in 2000 Keyes didn't have all that much of a backlist, even less in America.  I checked amazon.co.uk to see when her next was due, and found out it was still a while.  Then serendipitously, while browsing in a discount bookstore, I found a British copy of Rachel's Holiday just sitting there waiting to be discovered by an American reader.  I snapped it right up, took it home, and read it practically in one sitting.  

What I remember most is pouring over the Luke bits.  To my relatively unexplosed romance mind, they were scorching.  Luke was da man, even in his leather pants.  I was completely jealous that this other Rachel had him.  The rest of the book, all of the addiction stuff, was pretty good too.

Anyway, this book has been sitting untouched  on my bookshelf since 2000, just gathering dust.  Then a week or so ago, I saw something on the internet, a reader's recommendation, that made me want to pick it up again.  I thought it was every bit as good as I found it the first time around, but for different reasons.

Rachel Walsh is in a muddle.  Everyone in her life is upset at her, and her transplanted Irishman's life in NYC is about to come to an abrupt end and all because she accidentally took a few too many pills one night and ended up in the emergency room getting her stomach pumped.   This could happen to anyone, she feels, but her friends, her boyfriend, Luke, and her family feel differently.  Before she knows it, she's on a plane back to Ireland and, from there, incarcerated in a treatment facility, the Cloisters, for drug addiction.  Rachel went along with the hysteria because she'd heard of the Cloisters - its famous "clients" and its fabulous spa-like facilities - but now that she's there, things aren't quite as she'd expected.  

They're treating her as if she were like the other losers there - a real addict.   And that's not so posh nor so funny.

What I'd forgotten about this book is how funny it is, in a dark sort of way.  The humor isn't black, but it's pretty tarnished.  A nice dark gray.  Rachel's observations about her surroundings and her problems are both cutting and self-deprecating at the same time.  I laughed continually throughout, so much so that Max finally got sick of it, and told me to "Knock ert off, Mommy!"  He wanted to know what the joke was.

Keyes pulls off a pretty intereresting narratorial feat with Rachel, making her snobbish and humble at the same time, taking her time in revealing the true Rachel.  This is even more impressive as the book is done in first person which normally reveals more than it conceals.  Here, however, Rachel is so befogged by her addiction and her denial that she sees life and her history differently at different parts of the novel.  First person POV, when done well, is good for creating intimacy with the reader and getting the reader to side with the protagonist, which is why Rachel initially seems "just misunderstood" by those surrounding her.  But as the layers of Rachel's onions are peeled away during her Cloisters stay, incidents take on new shades of meaning, and Rachel herself becomes quite multi-dimensional.  There is one scene with her parents that manages to dig a well of character depth in just a few short pages and makes you ache for Rachel and understand her in a completely new way.

The drug addiction and recovery process is examined fully, but not in textbook fashion.  All of the information Keyes imparts flows naturally from the narrative, never seeming false, but illuminating addiction and the addictive personality with a bright beam.   This is what I found fascinating to read this time around - how all of these diverse people Rachel meets have the same problems with addiction and all of the same attendant deviant behaviors.  Unlike lots of stories about addiction, however, this one ends hopefully, with the understanding that recovery is ongoing and a great deal of work, but possible.

Rachel's romance with her boyfriend Luke is told mainly in flashback and is a significant portion of the novel, not so much because the romance is crucial but because the way Rachel interacted with Luke illuminates how much of a problem she truly had with drugs and alcohol and self-esteem.  Luke himself is pretty wonderful, very scrumptious, and provides most of the lighter touches the novel needs to keep it from being bogged down with weighty issues.

All in all this is a wonderful novel about addiction and the long process of recovery, full of dark  (occasionally raunchy) humor and some nice tender romantic parts.  Two thumbs up from me. 

tags: books  marian keyes  chick lit