In The Lesser Bohemians, Eimear McBride seems to be determined to combat the soullessness of pornography.

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride. Penguin, Random House, 320 pages, $26

By Lucas Spiro

It is a bit of a miracle. Author Eimear McBride is following up her celebrated debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing with an ambitious novel that is equally compelling and emotionally charged. She spent nearly a decade struggling to have her first book published before Galley Beggar took a chance. The gamble paid off: McBride won multiple awards for her fragmented vision of a raw coming-of-age story. (The book won both the Goldsmiths and Bailey’s prizes in 2013, which miraculously slots her into avant-garde and mainstream categories.) McBride returns to similar experimental stylistic and thematic territory with The Lesser Bohemians. Once again, she undercuts conventional love story platitudes, placing feminine sexual discovery at the heart of the narrative.

Eily is a first-year drama student who has just arrived in London from rural Ireland. Eighteen and eager to reinvent herself, we follow her from initial audition to the end of her first year. Early on we note Eily’s alienation, how she displaces her emotions by channeling them through the voices of others. At this point, Eily’s voice resembles that of the heroine from A Girl. Eily, however, turns out to be more hopeful. Though her life has been marred by early childhood abuse, she managed to find a way to compartmentalize the trauma, putting her life on hold. Having left the Ireland of “half-formed things,” Eily is now ready to embrace life’s possibilities: “I will make myself of life here for life is this place and would be start of mine.” She is happier in exile because she can begin to develop an independent life.

Eily is catapulted into a wished-for new life when she loses her virginity to the much older Stephen, a mildly famous thirty-eight year old actor, idling in mid-life in a squalid bedsit in Camden. He indulges his sensuous side and is eager to help Eily discover hers. But his casual sensuality, and her inexperience, ends up turning into a love affair that neither of them expected or wanted.

Theirs is an intense and painful affair, brutally honest. Writing graphically about the doings of the libido poses a considerable problem for a writer, given that it inevitably intertwines voyeurism and literary revelation. McBride pulls off her story’s erotic scenarios like no other contemporary author. Her prose is neither lurid or pornographic, and the plot is far more than just a way to take up some time between sex scenes. The Lesser Bohemians doesn’t serve up conventional erotica; there isn’t a clandestine (or naughty) angle to McBride’s vision of coupling: she doesn’t simply want to arouse. What sets McBride apart is her graphic, and illuminating, depiction of female sexuality.

McBride seems to be determined to combat the soullessness of pornography, which the author calls “the hairless engaging in the joyless.” Sex becomes the way Eily and Stephen communicate, the directness of their bodies silencing their urge to speak. McBride brilliantly covers all the emotional and physical aspects of a relationship, from the awkward to the terrifying: there’s trust, betrayal, joy, lust, humor, pain, and love. In the process, the novel shatters the illusions of sexual attraction pedaled in conventional adult romances. The only way Stephen and Eily can break out of corrupting social and psychological illusions of desire is, via sex, to rebuild their perceptions of their bodies from the atomic level up.

McBride’s prose style is pleasingly animated and visceral. She was a drama student in London in the mid ’90s and there is a vivid theatrical quality to her narrative. She discards grammatical neatness when it would compromise the articulation of the inner life of her characters. People don’t just do a line of cocaine, rather, “nostrils butterfly.” McBride treats sex the same way; it is about evoking feeling rather than mapping out positions. Eily is not just nervous; she is filled with “thrillpleasuredread,” a linguistic mashup that is as unsettling as it is understandable. Don’t be put off by McBride’s linguistic playfulness: approached with a little patience, the story is really quite accessible.

In fact, her language becomes more conventional as the love story progresses. Extended monologues are given ordinary syntax, though she adds dramatic flourishes, such as placing empty spaces where commas are called for — the idea is to emphasize silence as a defense against vulnerability. She is more lyrical and warm, allowing her characters to become rhapsodic, silly even, without punishing them for their spontaneity. This relaxation marks a departure from her debut volume, and it is welcome. A Girl may be a more perfect book. It is tightly wound up in order to achieve a single goal, to serve as a vehicle for a unique voice. But The Lesser Bohemians includes precious room for the possiblity of moving forward.

It is heartening these days to see a writer being acclaimed for books that challenge the reader in terms of difficult subject and linguistic invention. David Foster Wallace speculated about how entertaining and rewarding fiction could be produced in the trivializing age of television and the internet. Sex no longer earns an edgy niche in literary fiction because it is taboo (D.H. Lawrence); ironically, we pay attention to writers now because eroticism has become a commonplace in popular culture. Films like Shame, Nymphomaniac, and Love all attempt to do in cinema what McBride accomplished in fiction — to reinvent our wonder at the desires of the flesh. What remains once the old obscenities have fled? What is sacred if nothing is profane? McBride dares to put sexual discovery at the heart of her narrative and finds that, with the old moral questions in abeyance, we still have much to learn from the language of sex.

Lucas Spiro is a writer living outside Boston. He studied Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin and his fiction has appeared in the Watermark. Generally, he despairs. Occassionally, he is joyous.