Slipping

Irish novelist John Toomey’s novella Slipping (2017) uses the multi-faceted construction sometimes known as the Rashomon effect—the same event described from a variety of conflicting and often irreconcilable points of view. Toomey applies this technique to a darkly comic reverse mystery: We know from the beginning of the story that its middle-aged schoolteacher protagonist murdered his wife, and spend the bulk of the plot piecing together why he would have done so.

Forty-nine-year-old Albert Jackson, a schoolteacher in the Dublin suburbs, has had the exact same daily routine for the past 25 years. Married to Valerie, whom he claims to love, Al nevertheless spends as much of his day as possible out of the house to avoid having to listen to Val’s chipper small talk and pleasantries. In general, Al hates most of what he encounters—in particular, “the murderous, crimson flow of banality” he finds in almost everyone around him.

One day, after an epiphany that shows Al just how small his existence is in the grand scheme of the universe, he decides that the best way to shake up his life and to make up for years of meaninglessness is to do something so grand, destructive, and libertine that it will punctuate the rest of his years. In short, Al kills Val. Quickly caught, he is sentenced to spend the rest of his life in the psych ward of what used to be the prominent Reil Institute.



As the novel opens, the incarcerated Al records a confession to the murder and sends it to Charlie Vaughan, a writer whom Al hopes to persuade to turn his story into a novel. In Al’s mind, by exploring what Al has done through the lens of fiction, Charlie would make him and his actions comprehensible enough to Al’s children that they would no longer see him as a monster. He doesn’t seek their forgiveness or sympathy, but he does hope that through Charlie’s writing, his son, Jake, and daughter, Abigail, will experience a measure of empathy for Al’s emotional state.

Al’s confession, a first-person description of his many petty and nasty annoyances, the ways in which the staid and uneventful life he finds himself living has failed him, and his judgmental observations of his students, neighbors, and random passersby, makes up the bulk of the novel. The only person who escapes being run down by Al’s monologue is a new teacher, the young and pretty Aimee Quinn. Al has fixated on Aimee, turning a crush into a series of long and complex fantasies about the perfect life he and she could have together—if only Val weren’t in the picture. Of course, at no time does Al consider the fact that Aimee has absolutely no interest in him whatsoever. These fantasies finally push Al into committing the murder and explain the meaning of the novella’s title: Al’s mind has slipped the moorings of reality, and he is under the sway of dangerous delusions. He buys rope, a saw, and a shovel; bludgeons Val to death; and is found six hours later cradling her body lovingly on a beach.

Charlie undertakes the project, interested in the idea of trying to truly understand the unreliable and not completely transparent Al. Charlie confronts Al about the details Al’s confession is missing—in particular, exactly what took place during the six hours after the murder and before the beach. Charlie also investigates the murder from a variety of other perspectives, recording his interviews with the witnesses and analyzing how their accounts differ from Charlie’s and from each other.



These witnesses become other first-person narrators in the novel and include those who know him intimately or who interacted with Al in the lead up to the crime. We hear from one of Al’s students and from a fellow teacher, from a barista in Al’s favorite coffee shop, from the policemen who found him with Val’s body. One memorable testimony comes from the prison psychiatrist, Marko Novak, an unhelpful and not particularly invested doctor whose reaction to Al is cold and obnoxious. Al’s daughter, Abigail, provides another interesting perspective, which is colored by Charlie’s immediate attraction to her “unadorned beauty” and his hopes that the bond he feels between them is mutual.

The final word, however, again comes from Al, who finally submits to Charlie’s demands to explain what he was doing right after the murder. Charlie writes in the third-person about himself, painting himself as a novelist would—possibly, the way he hopes Charlie eventually will. This final confession supplement leaves many critics disappointed because it doesn’t seem to answer fundamental questions in the story’s central mystery, but it does allow Toomey time to play with meta-fictional elements of writing a book like the one he has just written.