A Beautiful Loan

In this intense if woolly philosophical novel, Irish writer Costello (Barcelona) traces a woman’s decades-long path of self-discovery through two troubling relationships and her life-affirming passion for the writings of Carl Jung. Anna, a 19-year-old country girl from Galway, meets worldly 30-something Peter in 1985 Dublin, where she works as a teacher. She loses her virginity to him while drunk and has no memory the next morning but feels sore and ashamed and tells him she hadn’t wanted to have sex. Over time, she comes to see Peter’s ill-suitedness as a mate, but not before they marry. She takes comfort from Jung’s “poetic” approach to the psyche and the I Ching’s embrace of chance, and she stays with Peter through two failed pregnancies, which she later attributes to the chlamydia he gave her. After eight years of marriage, he asks for a separation, and she painfully agrees. Four years later, at 37, Anna meets a Muslim Frenchman named Karim in a bar. She likes his shy, boyish manner, and they begin dating, but as he becomes more devout, he condemns the Western novels and music she enjoys, and her Jungian therapist encourages her to leave him. Costello elicits sympathy for Anna as she struggles to grow, though the passages with the therapist are didactic. It’s a mixed bag. (Mar.)