The novel everyone is talking about is Eimear McBride's multi-award winning A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. The wittiest verdict was Anne Enright's, in these pages nine months ago, when the novel was a mere twinkle in the judges' eyes. McBride, Enright said, was a writer of genius. But she was not sure that the novel was any good.

The book came out early in the prize-judging season. There have been a lot of reviews, and not a bad one among them. But it was comical to see reviewers sidestepping their primary duty: informing prospective readers what this novel was actually "about". Plotwise.

McBride's novel records the inchoate thoughts, sense impressions and "life-story", foetus to corpse, of an "I". That she has a name is mentioned as important in the first and last sentences. That name is never divulged, any more than precisely when, or where (other than loathsome Ireland), the novel is set.

In the womb, "I" forms a relationship – a kind of incest of the soul – with a brother (unnamed "you") two years older than her. His brain has been eaten away, and his life will be shortened by infantile cancer. "I" is brutalised by her "Ma", raped by an uncle, and spiritually terrorised by the Catholic church. A grandfather dies. "I" gets a higher education but subjects herself, punitively, to the lowest sexual humiliations. She kills herself. This is not "narrative". It's a bunch of clues at the scene of the novel.

McBride's book poses a number of big questions. One is: why does Irish fiction so hate Ireland? She was raised in County Sligo, but now lives in Norwich. When asked why not her "home" country, she blandly replies: "Ireland is a difficult place." Difficult, that is, in the same way that Sudan is a difficult place for pregnant women contemplating conversion to Christianity.

The day after A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing won the Bailey's prize, it was reported that a Galway "mother and baby home" run by the Bon Secours Sisters, had, for 40 years, been tossing 800 or so of their conveniently dead offspring down the home's septic tank, to avoid the awkwardness of death certificates. So much for the motherliness of mother church.

Ireland, said James Joyce, is the sow that eats its farrow. Exile was the only relationship one could have with the awful place. Beckett agreed. John Banville is currently depicting Dublin as one of the circles of hell in Quirke. His "seaside" novel, The Sea, won a Booker, but will have done nothing for Ireland's tourist industry. Problem: come up with a novel about Ireland that loves Ireland. But if Ireland were not the sow that eats its farrow, would it produce fiction as fine as Eimear McBride's?

The other question the book raises is: how do we think? There is only one fully formed statement in the novel – the title. It's an odd title. The compound with which "half-formed" usually associates is not "girls" but "thoughts" – as in "half-formed ideas". That, as we apprehend, is the point of the novel. We don't need the apparatus of grammar, syntax, punctuation in our inner discourse with ourselves. It's, at best, "half-formed".

We can see where McBride is coming from here. In Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies, a man ("man alone") lies in a bedroom with only his brain for company, slowly expiring. It ends: never anything there

any more

No punctuation, white space, then blackness. McBride's novel ends similarly, with death by drowning.

There now. There now. That was life. And now.

What?

My name is gone.

McBride accepts the proposition that without language there may be intelligence but nothing we can label thought. But our inner language is blunt instrumentation, not inarticulate but unarticulated. And it sure as hell doesn't need commas.

McBride makes her epistemological point with a prose that hovers just this side of sub-verbal. But does she ask too much of us? If, like Edna O'Brien (with whose The Country Girls McBride's book has clear affinities), McBride had used a more conventional linguistic toolkit, her novel would certainly have been a better "read". Do we not, as readers, have a right to that?

The term "stream of consciousness" is being applied to McBride's novel. But it doesn't really fit. McBride, unlike, say, Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway, offers nothing that "flows" – there's no "stream", as such. Nor, in any full sense, is there "consciousness". The fact is, we don't, as yet, have a term that does fit what McBride is doing.