https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/04/the-wild-laughter-by-caoilinn-hughes-review-an-irish-cain-and-abel

Resentment seethes between two brothers as their father lies dying in the wake of boom and bust

Caoilinn Hughes’s acclaimed debut novel, 2018’s Orchid and the Wasp, explored the long fallout from the global economic crash of 2008 through the coming-of-age story of Gael Foess, part of a formerly wealthy Irish family rapidly on the descent. Gael was a 21st-century Becky Sharp, cutting a merciless swathe through Dublin, London and the New York of Occupy Wall Street. Hughes’s follow-up, the darkly adventurous The Wild Laughter, loosely follows a similar theme of the consequences of boom and bust, but stays closer to the festering claustrophobia of home.

“‘Ireland is where strange tales begin and happy endings are possible.’ Charlie Haughey said that, and mind what a hammer of an end he got.” Wisecracking and woeful, Doharty “Hart” Black is the 25-year-old younger son of a terminally ill, failing farmer, Manus, a proud man known by his sons as “the Chief”. While Hart’s brother, Cormac, two years his senior, got the university education and then founded a series of successful startups in Dublin, Hart is left toiling on the family farm in County Roscommon, along with the boys’ brittle mother, a former nun, whom Hart mostly refers to with hostility by her name, Nóra. The elder son is favoured by the Chief for his flamboyance and entrepreneurial talent and by Nóra as a co-conspirator against the hapless Hart, whose eventual scapegoating is foreshadowed throughout.