Here's Amazon’s Synopsis for Caroline O’Donoghue's The Rachel Incident (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023):
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever [...]
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.
Before discussing her attraction to Dr. Frederick Byrne, Rachel shared some of her sexual history, by relating that when she was 17, she used her birthday money to “procure the morning-after pill”. Rachel lived at home during college, but to facilitate having sex, which she was “obsessed with having”, she moved out, because she was exhausted with having to sex at house parties, in parked cars, and in campus bathrooms.
Rachel: “[...] there’s something depressing about asking your boyfriend to meet you at “our bathroom.”
Interestingly, Rachel stated that having sex: “[....] as a teenager was more mature than anything between the ages of eighteen and twenty [...]”
18-year-old Rachel had taken Dr. Byrne’s first-year Victorian Literature seminar group at University College Cork, and she was thought to be “one of his favorites”. Rachel narrated that Dr. Byrne was “a very big person, 6’5” and extremely wide, [with] a farmer’s build”. And with a “broad brow, wide nose, heavy-lidded eyes [that] all came together”
Other than her boyfriend’s views, Rachel stated that: “Dr. Byrne was the only other man in my life whose opinions I cared about.”
Rachel reminisced that Dr. Byrne was a lover of “fancy little cakes” like Portuguese tarts, which he would bring to class “still warm from the English Market.”
Dr. Byrne was “everyone’s favorite lecturer”. Why? Mostly because: “[...] the English faculty was mostly women.” Plus, per Rachel: “Having a large man teach you about a book felt exciting, like Dead Poets Society.”
When Rachel visited Dr. Byrne’s office, she thought, “Are we gonna fuck?” And that wasn’t particular to Dr. Byrne, because she had that erotic thought anytime she was in a small room with a man - whom she wasn’t related to. For example, she related:
I could be standing next to a seventy-year-old man in a lift and think: I hope he doesn’t want to have sex; I’m still on my period.
However, Rachel really did want to have sex with her professor, whom she had a quiet, but obvious, crush on since she was 18. And she was “pretty sure” that all the other first-year school girls “[...] were all hoping to fuck Dr. Byrne.”
Dr. Byrne was obviously different: I really did want to have sex with him. It wasn’t just that he was a random man in a small room. I had been nursing a quiet crush on him since my first year, a crush I only kept private because of how annoyingly obvious it seemed. I didn’t really talk to the girls in my year but I was pretty sure we were all hoping to fuck Dr. Byrne. He was huge, and passionate, and he was the only man under fifty in the English department.
Dr. Byrne was married, which, interestingly, Rachel found “most tantalizingly” attractive, but Rachel’s attraction to her married professor should not be surprising, because as R. Don Steele related in Date Young Women For Men Over 35, being married makes attractive (older) men more attractive to (younger) women. And not only was Dr. Byrne married, but he was married to his former (grad) student.
Before Rachel left her professor’s office, she: “[...] turned around to see another girl waiting to discuss her essay and potentially to be fucked by Dr. Byrne.”
During her senior year, Rachel worked at O’Conner Books and, by that time, she had taken several of Dr. Byrne’s classes. One day, Dr. Byrne entered O’Conner Books.
“Rachel,” Dr. Byrne said. “I didn’t know you worked here.”
“Hello!” I said brightly, stumbling into that young person’s problem of never knowing how to address your professors [...] “Yes!”
“Any recommendations?” he asked politely [...]
After they had a laugh over Rachel’s recommendation, Dr. Byrne “caught” her eye, and she thought: Fuck me and I’ll say more things!
Dr. Byrne’s visit to O’Conner Books caused Rachel to have “perfect conviction” that she was going to “rebound” from her ex-boyfriend - with her college professor. “How chic!”
Dr. Byrne appeared to be “perplexed” by Rachel’s “half-flirting”, but he was not “altogether uninterested.”
Dr. Byrne wrote The Kensington Diet, a book on “Victorian Ireland during the famine”, and after he inquired about how many of his books had been pre-ordered by O’Conner Books, Rachel lied.
I saw that the order selection was zero.
“Fifteen,” I said. “Fifteen copies.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Quite a lot, then.”
Rachel lied, because she wanted to protect Dr. Byrne “against the world’s many disappointments.” She wanted to “guard him” with her body the way she would a “baby or small dog.” In addition, due to the fact that he towered over her, he made her feel “petite”. Per Rachel: “[...] to feel protective over someone who physically towers over you is a hell of a drug.”
Subsequently, Rachel introduced James, her co-worker and roommate, to Dr. Byrne, which caused Dr. Byrne to: “[...] move quickly, as if realizing that he had been lingering too long.” Consequently, Rachel wanted to “drive across the counter and keep him from escaping” from their “private world filled with little poses and sexy jokes about literature.”
To cover her tracks about lying about the pre-ordered copies of Dr. Byrne’s book, Rachel entered fake pre-orders. For instance, she entered a pre-order for Moira Finchley, whom had died two years prior. Consequently, James surmised that Rachel was attracted to her professor.
James practically leapt into the air.
“You dirty bitch!”
A week later, after Rachel and James entered the remaining fake (back-dated) preorders, Ben, the bookstore’s manager, inquired, “What the fuck is the The Kensington Diet? Is that like the Atkins?” James replied by lying that The Kensington Diet had been written by Dr. Byrne, a “brilliant doctor”, whom had been profiled on Fergal O’Riordan’s show and that there had been “a lot of buzz” around the professor; thus, O’Conner Books should ask him to do a signing or book launch at the bookstore. The scheme was hatched over the idea that to get over her ex, James wanted Rachel to have a “glamorous, [and] exciting rebound” with her professor. And James was “keen for drama” too.
Consequently, after class, Rachel told Dr. Byrne that the bookstore’s manager wanted to know if the professor wanted to “launch his book at O’Conner Books.” Perplexed, Dr. Byrne agreed to the book signing. And to receive details about the event, he gave Rachel his wife slash publisher’s email address, which caused Rachel’s face to turn jelous red.
While “under two duvets eating chow mein”, Rachel and James devised a plan to get Dr. Byrne to stay at the bookstore after everyone left. James’ plan was to make Dr. Byrne: “[...] sign all the copies of his book. Stick him in the stockroom. Then [...] seduce him.”
Rachel, “In the stockroom?”
James, “You’ve never fantasized about fucking someone in the stockroom?”
Rachel: “Of course I had.”
On the day of the book launch, Deenie Harrington, Dr. Byrne’s wife, “scanned her eggy eyes over” Rachel. Deenie was trying to “puzzle out” Rachel’s interest in Dr. Byrne. Why?
There were too many cliches about male English professors and their adoring young students for her not to have been on the alert. She had been in his class herself, albeit as an MA student.
Deenie wanted to figure out whether I was the kind of girl who has ill-advised but unrequited crushes on her professors, or the kind of girl who orchestrated bookshop launches in order to seduce them. I don’t think she found an answer.
Dr. Byrne, looking “handsome and wilted”, arrived at O’Conner Books “just after six”. Consequently, Rachel narrated: “I realized then how much my crush had developed [...]” James was impressed too.
“Oh my God,” James said [to Rachel], when he saw him across the shop. “I bet he’s hung like a chandelier”
“Shut up.”
“Do you have clean kickers on? He prodded.
“I’m not discussing this here.”
“But all the same, I was wearing nice knickers.”
About thirty people came to Dr. Byrne’s book launch. “Twenty-two of them were friends, family or work colleagues [...]” Rachel “delivered a short, burbling introduction [...] Afterwards Dr. Byrne read the introduction from his book [...]”
After the reading, Dr. Byrne was set up at a table that we usually used to stack the toilet books on. His friends and colleagues queued up to speak to him. A photographer from the Evening Echo was there to take pictures for the social diary.
“It was all over by nine o’clock.” Dr. Byrne’s “friends decamped to a pub”, but Dr. Byrne, without being prompted by Rachel or James, decided to “stick around the bookshop to sign the excess copies”. Dr. Byrne’ wife, “kissed him, getting up on her tiptoes to do it, and said she’d see him at the pub.” But that only annoyed Rachel and made her covetous and vindictive. “Fuck you,” She thought. “I’m going to shag your husband just for that.”
My analysis of The Rachel Incident will abruptly stop here, because the shocking plot twist that occurred five paragraphs later does not fit with the theme or any motifs of this blog. But I'll end by sharing that Hamilton Cain related in a review for the New York Times that: "All the incidents in “The Rachel Incident” add up to a gratifying, accomplished novel."
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