Milkman and mimesis

As I near the end of Anna Burns's 2018 novel, Milkman, it strikes me that no one will finish reading this novel and say: I loved it. It's not a novel to love; it's one to appreciate, one that hits you like a kick to the stomach, one that informs you like none other about what it's like to live in a city torn by violence and civil war. It's a work that explores the consciousness of the (unnamed) narrator to the point where we know her intimately but also feel that she's strange and enigmatic, not someone we could "know" in any way in the course of our lives. In telling her own story, she has a disconcerting way of ruminating on the trivial and unessential and then, unexpectedly, hitting us w/ key facts about her family, her life, and her world. For ex., after much depiction of her slow recovery from the poison that "Tablets" sneaked into her drink at a club, the narrator is out and about and she runs across Tablets's sister, also poisoned by her, but more severely injured by the toxin - in fact, she's blinded. Suddenly, as the narrator is speaking with T's sister her (the narrator's) "Third Brother" turns up out of nowhere - and we learn that he's been in love w/ T's sister, though he's married to someone else, someone from outside the tight circle of this community, someone he doesn't love. And that opens the gate for the narrator to explain that in her culture nobody marries the one he/she loves because everyone know that life spans are inevitably short, everyone will eventually be killed in youth by one side or the other in this war, so there's a tacit understanding that it's better to marry one you don't love so as to avoid that inevitable heartbreak. The narrator herself recognizes that her parents were never in love (her father is dead, and is one of the saddest of Burns's inventions - a victim of childhood abuse who as a result was cold and distant and suffering from severe depression. No, this book is not for all readers. Burns has created a mimetic narration, in which the difficulty all will face in reading this oblique and meandering narration imitates (and re-creates) the difficulty in the lives of the narrator and the others in her family and social circle.