Molly Bonamici

I. The Angel of Death Premise

Molly Bonamici announces its central conceit early and directly: a local faith healer, encountering the teenage Molly, declares her an “Angel of Death” — a designation the novel treats with the same flat, unalarmed register it applies to everything else, and one that would be genuinely unsettling if Molly herself were not so thoroughly unmoved by it.¹ Kirkus Reviews, assessing the novel, put the effect precisely: “a gleefully and wonderfully odd protagonist eases readers into a bare-bones plot,” adding that “Molly's apathy toward death isn't as strange as other characters think, more a curiosity than an obsession” and that the same is true of “her religious views; Molly doesn't reject religion but continually (and interestingly) questions it.”² The premise does real structural work beyond its shock value: it gives the novel license to have death follow Molly through the whole of her adolescence and adulthood — the smashed toad, a neighbor's decomposed body, eventually the poisoning recounted in the related story “Mia Bambina” — without needing to explain each occurrence as coincidence, curse, or plot contrivance. Once the reader has accepted the Angel of Death framing, death's recurrence around Molly reads as thematic coherence rather than authorial convenience.

II. The Toad and the Kitchen: Affect Displaced, Not Absent

The novel's opening establishes its central technical method in the space of a single page. Sixteen-year-old Molly, having just witnessed her father choke her mother in the kitchen, retreats to the backyard and turns her attention to a sick toad: “I searched the backyard for several minutes until I found a large rock. I walked over to where the toad sat, lifted the lid of the trashcan until he fell onto the cement pad, where he continued to croak and shake. To put him out of his misery, I smashed the rock against him a few times and watched his guts smear across the concrete. Then I sat on the bottom step for at least twenty minutes.”³ A companion essay on this site identifies exactly what the prose withholds here: no shock, no interpretive frame, no causal link drawn between the violence indoors and the violence Molly commits on the animal — the narration juxtaposes the two acts with equal flatness, displacing affect from the domestic trauma onto an ostensibly unrelated action and leaving the reader to do the connecting work.⁴ The very next paragraph confirms the register will not shift: Molly mixes herself a drink — “I added some vodka from my stash hidden in the closet, and took a few sips”³ — reported in the identical declarative calm used to describe the toad's death moments before.

III. Aunt Bianca's Diagnosis and Molly's Deflection

The novel is careful to name Molly's flatness through another character rather than through Molly's own self-awareness — a structural choice that keeps the diagnosis external and contestable rather than settling the question from inside Molly's own head. Watching Molly's unmoved reaction to a chaotic kitchen accident, Aunt Bianca says: “The girl doesn't seem human sometimes. It's like she doesn't feel things… Always so cool, so cold… It's not normal. I tell you it ain't right.”⁵ Molly's response is characteristic of the novel's whole comic strategy: rather than refute the accusation, she escalates it into a deadpan joke — “I come from another galaxy. I am an alien… My people are planning an invasion” — delivered, the narration specifies, “completely straight-faced.”⁵ The joke performs the very detachment Bianca has just diagnosed, which is the point: Molly does not defend herself against the charge of inhumanity by demonstrating warmth, she defends herself by being even stranger, leaving the reader (and Bianca) with no ground to stand on except the observation that something in Molly does not operate the way grief is supposed to operate.

IV. The Ghost of Moll Flanders

Mulhern has stated directly, in an interview with Shelf Unbound, that “Molly is a derivative of Moll, from Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders… I was inspired by her character,”⁶ and the allusion rewards attention precisely because the novel never announces it internally. A companion essay on this site traces the structural inheritance: both Mollys are women whose survival depends on hard-won self-sufficiency acquired through deprivation, both narrate their own lives retrospectively without excessive self-pity, and both ask the reader to weigh their moral standing against a society that had already failed them before either committed her own transgressions.⁷ The surname “Bonamici” — Italian for “good friends” — supplies the novel's central irony: a name promising warmth and fellowship, worn by a character whose defining trait, per Bianca's own diagnosis, is precisely the opposite.⁸

V. Comedy as Survival: The Maggots and the Word Processor

The novel's comic register reaches its purest expression in a moment a companion essay singles out as characteristic of the whole book: discussing a dead body with a store clerk, Molly asks, without transition, “Maggots are a good source of protein… Do you sell word processors?”⁹ The juxtaposition — the macabre and the mundane colliding inside a single breath, the horror of death deflated by the practical demands of shopping — is, as that essay observes, comedy in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor, where grotesque physical reality and ordinary aspiration coexist in the same sentence and characters retain, against all odds, their dignity and their claim to some form of grace, however ambiguous.¹⁰ What distinguishes Mulhern's version of the technique from O'Connor's is tone: where O'Connor's grotesque comedy typically arrives freighted with impending violence, Molly's version arrives as simple non sequitur, a mind moving without transition between the fact of death and the errand of the afternoon, which is itself the joke and the diagnosis at once.

VI. The Adult Narrator Who Never Softened

The novel is narrated from adulthood looking back, and it takes unusual care to specify exactly how much distance separates the narrating adult from the remembered teenager — not, as a reader might expect, in order to show growth away from the child's coldness, but to confirm its persistence. Molly's opening chapter is dated with documentary precision — “I was sixteen, a senior in high school; the year was 1980”¹¹ — and later, discussing public fascination with a neighbor's death, the adult narrator writes: “I found it a strange paradox then, as I still do now, that most of us don't want to think about death, our own mortality… Yet, when we hear about someone else's death…”¹² A companion essay identifies the construction “then, as I still do now” as the novel's most important single clause: it collapses the distance between the sixteen-year-old and the narrating adult that the book has otherwise carefully maintained, confirming that the detachment Bianca diagnosed was never a phase to be outgrown but a durable, permanent feature of the consciousness narrating the entire novel.¹³ This is a significant interpretive choice: a reader who assumed Molly's coldness was trauma-response, likely to soften with age and hindsight, is told directly that it did not soften, which removes the comfortable redemptive reading and leaves the harder, more interesting one — that this is simply who Molly is, and the novel is not interested in curing her of it.

VII. Reception and the Question of Structure

Kirkus Reviews' assessment of the novel is notable for pairing real praise with a specific structural criticism: “while she may have a cold exterior, her distinctiveness is an appealing quality and often amusing,” but “Mulhern's narrative hits the occasional standstill, where Molly repeatedly ponders the same issues with Nonna or Gabe”¹⁴ — a fair observation, and one that a full-length comparative study on this site extends into a broader claim about Mulhern's fiction generally: that his work is stronger in the scene than in the arc, more compelling in the moment of revelation than in the machinery that connects one revelation to the next, a limitation shared with writers whose primary gifts are for voice and character rather than for plot, including William Trevor, Alice Munro, and James Joyce.¹⁵ The criticism is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as an unfriendly review, because it identifies precisely what the novel trades away in exchange for its deadpan method: a narrator this disciplined about withholding interpretation will, almost by definition, produce scenes that circle the same unresolved question rather than scenes that resolve it and move the plot decisively forward.

VIII. Conclusion: What the Comedy Was For

The novel's emotional logic resolves, finally, not inside the text but in a fact Mulhern has disclosed about its origin: in the same Shelf Unbound interview that confirms the Defoe allusion, he revealed that “the true genesis of Molly is the fact that five important people in my own life died in less than a year.”¹⁶ Read against that disclosure, the toad, the vodka, the maggots-and-word-processor non sequitur, and the adult narrator's confirmed, unsoftened detachment stop reading as coldness for its own sake and start reading as a demonstrated coping mechanism, forged under a concentration of loss most readers will never have to survive in a single year. The comedy is not a denial of grief; it is grief's specific defense, observed closely enough by its author to be rendered without a shred of sentimentality and without, either, the false comfort of a character who eventually learns to feel the "right" amount. Molly Bonamici does not become warmer by the novel's end. She remains exactly as strange, exactly as funny, and exactly as durable as the year that made her, which is the most honest account of surviving overwhelming loss this corpus offers.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Unreliable Child Narrators → Pastiche and Undertow