A Little Luck, Claudia Pineiro

Claudia Pineiro chronicles one woman’s emergence from the abyss

 A Little Luck opens with a deceptively simple sentence: ‘The barrier arm was down.’ It is the

beginning of a paragraph high in stakes, if simple in prose. The barrier is a security barrier
at a level crossing. As traffic begins to build with no sign of a train, one driver and then another
decide to skirt their car around the barrier and drive across the tracks. A foolish risk, clearly,

gravely irresponsible. But, as the novel repeatedly emphasises, ‘The abyss calls to you.’ 

The novel follows Mary Lohan as she returns to Temperley, Buenos Aires where she grew up. This is not a happy reconnection. Any potential nostalgia is undermined by Mary’s discomfort as she reflects on the circumstances that caused her younger self to flee to Boston. The details of these circumstances are revealed by degrees, but the reason for Mary’s flight is not as interesting as

Pineiro’s encapsulation of how it feels to exist beyond the edge of respectability.

As Mary navigates what was once home, she is hyper-aware of her new position as an outcast: ‘I’m one of those people. Capable of plunging headlong into the abyss […]’ Phrases like these emphasise the security barrier’s significance as a threshold. Its role is to guard members of society from catastrophe. To cross that protective barrier and risk harm is to plunge oneself into an obliterating chasm. This threshold casts a shadow over Mary’s story, like an executioner’s blade swishing above the text. It signifies that Mary has crossed a societal boundary from which there is no easy return. 

However, whilst consumed by the abyss, Mary is never obliterated. She acknowledges that accepting her exiled position offers its own liberty. Her statement in full reads, ‘I’m one of those people. Capable of plunging headlong into the abyss to feel - finally - free.’ To be exiled is to be liberated from the pressure to please, to conform. ‘I’d never noticed that silence was the space I’d longed to inhabit,’ Mary confesses. Whilst the abyss may be a space of loneliness and shame, it also affords peace from the standards and social demands of others. ‘I’m no longer blonde, like most of the women who sent their kids to St Peter’s [...] I no longer wear the clothes we all wore,’ Mary states. These changes are more profound than mere superficial details. Mary seeks reassurance from her independence when facing moments of particularly intense anxiety: ‘I still have my hand in my hair, rubbing the short bristles at the top of my neck, when I realise that we’ve arrived.’ By touching her own body, in particular the parts of her body that she has decided to change whilst in Boston, Mary is able to centre herself. Whilst Pineiro never holds back on how severe a space the abyss is to occupy, her attention to the small details of Mary’s behaviour reveals that the abyss has also taught Mary how to depend on herself.

Yet, exemption from social concerns leaves room to fully revel in one’s own misfortune and pain and this can result in self-absorption. When Mary discusses her preference for first person narrative, she reflects Pineiro’s own narrative choices for the novel: ‘The third person creates a kind of protective distance. The first person, on the other hand, pulls me to the edge of the abyss, invites me to jump in.’ No distance is permitted in this story. The reader is painstakingly filled in on Mary’s every fluctuating feeling. Pineiro’s choice to submerge the reader in Mary’s emotions leaves little room for consideration for those she has hurt. In an age of cancelling (the understandable after-effect of movements such as #MeToo) a tale about moral regression has to tread a careful path. It must challenge us to accept that there is no room for harsh judgement when the potential for error, intentional or otherwise, is what makes us human. However, to not focus enough on the repercussions of harmful decisions is to allow space for narcissism. 

Ultimately, Mary does win my sympathy. The novel’s acknowledgment of the abyss, how it gapes just beyond the familiar, threatening to consume anyone who dares step too close unsettles any attempt at moral superiority. ‘The abyss tugs at your heels,’ Pineiro writes. ‘It both attracts and repels.’ The secret is in the title. With ‘A Little Luck’ it is possible to keep the abyss at bay, but one misstep and one can slip into that space and find themselves unable to return. This novel impresses this uncomfortable truth but also promotes the importance of kindness to those who have slipped. Whilst a little emphatic in its desperate attempt to let its sinner off the hook, it is reassuring to encounter something that presents atonement as a basic right we are all entitled to.  

If the reader holds in there, they will get to see Mary experience joy, although she remains wise to its fleeting nature. ‘Maybe that’s all happiness is, an instant inhabited, a random moment in which words are unnecessary because it would take too many of them to describe it. [...] Time compressed and narration’s failed attempts to expand it.’ If the abyss is infinite, the bottomless pit to which Satan was banished, then happiness is ‘time compressed’ into ‘an instant.’ But, Mary’s acknowledgement of the futility of attempting to describe happiness suggests that its potency is a match even for the all-engulfing abyss. Its evasion of rational explanation demonstrates that, like the abyss, it exists beyond the fringes of reason in a mysterious realm all of its own. It is just as easy to slip into it, as it is to plummet into the abyss. Overall, Pineiro gifts the reader a hopeful novel, despite its central catastrophe. By tempering its optimism with realism, she makes it all the more convincing that one can emerge from the abyss, if not unscathed, then at least alive.