Middle sister has a problem named Milkman: an IRA terrorist accosts her where she walks reading nineteenth-century novels on the street, striking a dark chord on the web of implication that entangles every member of her violently hyperpoliticized community lacking proper names. She’s passive every which way except for the strings of syntax that she unfolds into an enraging and beguiling narrative of which paranoia proves to be the best available interpreter. If this novel were a woman, and it is, it would tell its reader: this is what it’s like to be objectified and sustained by abjection’s dark laughter.