The Little Things

The American critic John Gardner once wrote, “Detail is the lifeblood of fiction.” In Chandelier, David O’Meara puts this claim to the test. An accomplished poet, O’Meara has a history of creating verisimilitude through vivid description, whether sketching a harsh autumn field in his poem “Field-Crossing” or moments of innocence and injury in “Recess.” But can a novel stand on expertly crafted images alone? In an interview with his publisher, he admits that a lifetime of honing the craft of poetry might be, at first, “a ghastly hindrance” to writing prose. There is no doubt that O’Meara deploys an envious eye for minutiae, but at times his vibrant scenes and free association of ideas distract from the narrative. While detail is indeed vital, O’Meara’s debut novel is a reminder that the real lifeblood of fiction consists of the right details, carefully chosen to connect to the story’s characters and themes.

The author’s grasp of language and metaphor comes through on every page. The first section follows Georgia, the daughter of Hugo and Sarah, on her trip to South Korea to teach English. When she arrives, her deep-rooted disillusionment about life is revealed through subtle depictions of her surroundings: The “naked pulse” of the sun is something from which she needs refuge. A Korean teacher has the “distracted look of being constantly harassed.” Her landlady observes her as if she were “a head of cabbage she was thinking of buying.” Even the refrigerator in her rooftop apartment seems ominous; it sounds like “an animal shifting inside a sleeping bag.” We glimpse her emotional interior through these deft observations. Together they reflect the mind of a young adult still reeling with teenage angst as she grieves the loss of her best friend and approaches a hostile world with trepidation.

O’Meara is at his best in his characterization of Georgia, where narrative direction and poetic precision intersect. One of the most powerful instances is when she details her suicide attempt, during which she is discovered by her father. Her memory centres on a “dazed housefly hammering against the window of the door,” repeatedly circling and crashing into the glass. This exquisite vignette captures the jarring, unsettling quality of trauma and the way it sometimes attaches to one inexplicable image. Beyond the beauty of the passage, the inclusion of the fly adds authenticity and nuance to Georgia’s past while also mirroring her current attempts to break through her emotional barriers.

Throughout, O’Meara zooms in on significant moments to heighten their intensity. In the second section, Hugo slowly recalls meeting Sarah in the bookstore where she worked. In an extended passage, he observes the way her hands gracefully “trickled across the keyboard” and the lack of any “colourful polish” on her nails. At the time, the reader is not aware of who this woman is, but the cinematic close‑up signals that this character is important — to both Hugo and the larger story. Later, when Georgia finds out her father has died, her focus shifts to the remnants of a cellphone’s packaging, to the “little heap of debris. The twist‑ties. The moulded plastic shells.” Her sudden detachment from emotion and her sustained focus on what is in front of her quietly express her inner turmoil and shock.

But Chandelier loses momentum when the author’s lyrical tendencies and aesthetic imagery distort the plot. This muddiness is most apparent in the third part, which follows Sarah as she drives to western Quebec to sell her childhood cottage. After surviving a flash flood, she distracts herself with working out, her app for identifying birds, and a previous sexual partner. The flood itself is not described, nor is another traumatic escape — this time from a bear — that happens a few pages later. She recounts running to safety from the animal in one oblique sentence: “It must take ten minutes.”

O’Meara’s instinct for subtlety also seems to lead him away from including critical information. Most notably, when Hugo travels to Spain to confront his architectural nemesis, the end of their conversation happens off the page. What should be the denouement of Hugo’s narrative goes unresolved. Instead, we see him aimlessly wandering an old neighbourhood in Barcelona. The reader too is left without closure.

I can understand what O’Meara is attempting to do with impressions instead of overt plot development. When Georgia is unable to pay for an oil delivery, he illustrates that she is on unsteady ground in a foreign country. When Sarah goes off on tangents, he reveals her to be uniquely self-involved. When all three characters confront addiction, he connects the far-flung family members and challenges their differences. Yet so many extraneous threads make the novel feel shapeless and inconsistent at times: the oil mishap is inconsequential, Sarah’s digressions are irrelevant to most of her actions, and their shared battle with substance abuse feels forced.

Despite the occasional narrative misfire, Chandelier succeeds, through juxtaposition, in portraying a fragmented family’s search for meaning. Even when O’Meara lingers too long on a scene gone wrong, it is mostly with enjoyable veracity. Chandelier is a true poet’s novel. At every turn, it affirms that detail is indeed the lifeblood of compelling fiction, and that you can get away with a lot when you master it.