Pushing Daisy by Christopher O’Halloran
Lethe Press (May 23, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Broadbent
Christopher O’Halloran’s Pushing Daisy has a simple premise: a grieving widower begins to suspect that his recently departed wife has returned from the great beyond. Roger Darling is the type of man women tell their girlfriends to dump immediately. He’s bitter and manipulative, self-centered and cruel. Daisy martyred herself to assure his happiness.
And we follow him around for three hundred-odd pages.
Pushing Daisy is a masterclass in deploying an unlikeable protagonist. We meet Roger as he vomits at his wife’s funeral. He’s a grieving widower — self-centered, but grieving. O’Halloran uses our impulse to sympathize with the bereaved to keep us reading about someone who embodies a garden-variety evil far worse for its banality. This jackass, we start to think. I know this jackass. He thinks he’s the center of the universe.
And because Roger does believe that, using a narrow point of view ensconces the reader in his delusion as Daisy’s funeral ends and the long work of living begins. Roger’s finances are unraveling. His in-laws won’t leave him alone. His relationship with his brother, who seems like an unmitigated jackass, is deteriorating. Shamefully soon after Daisy’s death, he begins a relationship with his neighbor, Mei. But as he starts to see glimpses of his dead wife, his character flaws become more and more apparent. Roger is a bad guy, and Daisy wants to prove it to the world.
Every time we want to fling the book against the wall, O’Halloran draws us back in. We sympathize with Roger’s fear of being alone. We understand why he’s seeking comfort with Mei. When he develops a relationship with one of Mei’s older tenants, we think: Maybe he really is good. Maybe he’s trying. But with a close POV, everything is filtered through the narrator. We buy into his delusions.
This book parallels an abusive relationship. By the time we realize our guy is a morally bankrupt, even dangerous person, it’s too late to get out. We’re stuck with Roger, too invested in his narrative to shut the book and walk away.
And it’s a fast-moving story, one that accurately portrays the wreckage death leaves in its wake — unpaid bills, empty rooms, piles of sympathy cards to acknowledge. Roger is alternately lonely and self-isolating, sad and angry (which we first chalk up to rage at Daisy’s self-annihilation). But as her ghost creeps into the narrative, Roger’s cracks begin to show. He can fake it. But Daisy won’t let him.
If you’re looking for a feminine revenge tale, Pushing Daisy will leave you cold. Instead, the novel plumbs the depths of everyday cruelty, of how easily we give our hearts away to people with callous motivations. Roger never really wants to hurt people. But his stunningly self-centered choices do it for him. Crushingly obtuse, callously cruel, Roger feels too familiar. It’s tough to make an audience stick around for that. O’Halloran pulls it off with panache.
