Three collections of short stories reviewed, from my early days at Books Ireland. At least it led to an enduring friendship with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.
Three more collections of short stories, the form publishers tell us doesn’t sell, but that they nevertheless continue, unaccountably, to publish. Perhaps they think that a book of short stories will act as a stepping stone towards a novel, which is where any money there is to be made would start to come in, and in many cases they are right. Or maybe a collection by an already established writer will have a better chance of commercial success. But the chief criterion should always be, as with any other media, are they any good in themselves?
Solomon’s Seal And Other Stories
By Molly McCloskey
(Phoenix House, £8.99)
My chief motivation in wanting to read this debut collection of short stories was to find out what kind of short story is winning all these competitions. Molly McCloskey was given the RTE/Francis MacManus Award in 1995, won the prestigious Fish Short Story Prize in 1996, and work from this volume has previously appeared in Phoenix Irish Short Stories 1996 and London Magazine. The answer is that work which is well-crafted to the point of being formulaic, which obeys the ‘write-what-you-know’ advice beloved of creative writing class instructors everywhere, and which is Californian touchy-feely about one’s family and friends, is almost always guaranteed to do well.
T. S. Eliot wrote of Henry James that, ‘He had a mind so fine no idea could corrupt it.’, and this ‘idea’ was taken up and explored in depth some years ago by the esteemed scholar and critic Denis Donoghue, in an essay entitled ‘Ideas And How To Avoid Them’. While ever conscious of the perils for the writer of fiction of over-indulging in intellectualisation, it would be nice if one felt that the author was at least aware that ideas existed, if only to be avoided. The sixteen stories in Solomon’s Seal are sensitive, confessional, with a subtle and exact use of imagery, and read as though they would sit well in the better class of women’s magazine. They are also generally too similar, with a monotony of narrative voice, theme and tone, and lack the thrust of any kind of controlling intelligence behind them.
Ms. McCloskey is an expatriate American living in Co. Sligo, and all the stories here are set in the States, if they are set anywhere, with homely, native locutions littering her prose, like ‘Funny thing is...’ and ‘Used to be...’ (both from ‘The Stranger’). Two succeeding paragraphs, from ‘The Wedding Day’, neatly point up all that is best and worst about her writing. The slyly self-conscious humour of: ‘Father is carefully inspecting his shoes as the ceremony continues. I suspect it is because he feels moved or sad or elated. But then I always was a romantic - attributing tender, tragic emotions to people when what they’re really thinking about is dinner or the new secretary with the nice breasts or the mounting pressure in their bladders’, is undercut when followed by the mawkish sentimentality of: ‘But this time I am right. When he looks up the struggle is apparent. He is of the old school – which, it seems, is still pumping out graduates – where they teach men not to cry. He surveys his family one by one, beginning with Sabina, his pride and joy. The girl he drove to piano lessons. The girl he took shopping for her first bikini. The girl he is giving away.’
‘Mythology’ contains some of the most beautiful phrases in the collection, and is the best single story. There is something of a harder edge than usual evident in ‘Diamonds’, ‘Death Of A Salesman’s Wife’ and ‘Losing Claire’, and if McCloskey could manage to temper the touchy-feeliness with this more dispassionate approach, she could well become a very considerable writer indeed. In the meantime, my advice to any reader approaching her work would be to slow your reading right down, as though you were reading poetry, so that you will be attuned to the inklings and nuances (two of McCloskey’s favourite words) of the prose, which will otherwise float right by. And McCloskey would do well to remember that there is more behind the white picket fence than the claustrophobic Updikean world of suburban adultery, marital breakdown, divorce and broken families. Ask David Lynch. Or David Leavitt. Maybe this collection is really very deep and moving, and I’m missing it all because of my inherent boorishness, but I don’t think so.
The Inland Ice And Other Stories
By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
(Blackstaff, £7.99)
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvellous bunch of stories. There are fourteen of them in all, one of which, the quasi-folktale ‘The search for the lost husband’, provides a thematic touchstone which links the other thirteen together, appearing, as it does, at the beginning, then between each story, and again at the end. All the pieces deal with, in some shape or form, love triangles, lost love, and the impossibility of reconciling Eros and Agape, love and friendship, passionate feelings with domestic, quotidian, day to day existence, and are generally told from a woman’s point of view.
‘Gweedore Girl’ is a deft depiction, in a deadpan, dispassionate, first-person voice, of the sexual awakening of an adolescent who is sent into service with a family in Derry in the 1920s. It ends with a reflection characteristic of the whole book, throughout which it will resonate: ‘I’d even got a new boy...His name is Seamus and he is a good boy, kind, and funnier than Elliot, and earning much more money. I know I can marry him any time I want to. It is amazing that I know that Seamus is good and kind and honest and will never mistreat me; also I will never love him. Or maybe that is not amazing at all. Maybe those two knowings are the same, two different knowings in the same shell, or one and the same knowing, bright as an egg with the sun dancing on it.’
The heroine of ‘Love, Hate and Friendship’, thinking of her relationship with a married man, asks herself: ‘Why should it be so hard to forget all this romantic stuff, and simply accept his friendship?’ ‘Bill’s New Wife’ is a very funny fantasy of marital role reversal, highlighting real inequalities.
In ‘Lily Marlene’ a middle-aged woman and a man who were lovers in their teens meet up again many years later, when they are both married to other people, and rekindle their affair, but it doesn’t last. This heroine speculates: ‘What I think is that life is like Doctor Zhivago up to a point – more like it than some would admit. People can have a great, passionate love. I have. Probably you have. But it doesn’t seem to survive. One way or another it gets done in, either because you stay together or you don’t. That’s what I think. If I were more loyal, or brave, or generous, perhaps it would be different. But how do you know if you are brave or just an eejit?’
‘Hot Earth’, set in Italy, features another middle-aged woman who is, or was, involved in an extra-martial affair, an even more unsatisfactory one than in the previous stories. Still, she leaves her husband anyway, not to be with her lover, but to be by herself, returning to Italy to teach English. There is an apt invocation of the image of a statue of an elderly Etruscan couple in a museum the heroine visits with her husband, a man of whom she thinks, ‘His love was loyal and enduring, if not very passionate. Probably it is loyal and enduring for that reason.’
‘Estonia’ gracefully interweaves the narrative of a librarian-poetess and her affair with a Swedish writer she met at a conference, with that of the Estonia ferry disaster. The story also contains some apposite meditations on literary art and literary politics, like: ‘As a compensation for career mistakes, her choice of pastime was good - better, probably, than golf or drink. Poetry consoles her in more ways than one, as it has consoled people in hospitals and in labour camps and in death camps. And she is in none of these things, but in a large, rich, gracious library’; and, ‘You could never tell with writers from other countries. You could not distinguish between the successful and the maybes and the ones who would be very lucky to get a review, the way you could at home, where everyone in the literary community could place everyone else in the pecking order as soon as they heard their name.’
Oddities in the collection include ‘Summer Pudding’, about a group of Irish people who go to Wales during the famine; ‘Spool of Thread’, an extremely well-written venture into the mind and methodology of your better class of serial killer; and ‘My Pet’, which is questionable in that it features the only character in the book with suicidal tendencies, who also happens to be homosexual.
One criticism of the collection is that towards the end the pace seems to flag, and some of the stories are too close for comfort in their repetition of the themes and tones of previous ones. ‘Greenland’ and ‘How Lovely The Slopes Are’, in particular, read like thinly veiled rewrites of ‘Estonia’. But there is enough here to be going on with, enough to save the suite from becoming too claustrophobic. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne does several things well. She is good on employing a folkloric underpin and an historical perspective (‘The search for the lost husband’ ‘Summer Pudding’, ‘Gweedore Girl’). She is good on social satire, putting the mores of contemporary Dublin under her microscope (the attitude of the woman in ‘Swiss Cheese’ to the North, the reference to how easy it is to get development money from the Film Board in ‘My Pet’). She is good in her healthy criticism and mistrust of male feminists (Kevin in ‘Hot Earth’, Paddy in ‘Swiss Cheese’, Michael in ‘The Woman With The Fish’).
‘What matters but the good of the story?’ says the narrator at the end of ‘The search for the lost husband’, which is the end of the book. Most of the stories here deal with well-educated and well-travelled people, although poverty has lurked in the early lives of some of them. Although so many stories about marital infidelity could become a bore, here the treatment is subtle, witty, wry. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has a great way of mixing and merging the realistic with something otherworldly, like crossing an Alice Munro or an Anne Tyler with an Angela Carter or a Jeanette Winterson. As I said, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvellous bunch of stories.
A World Full of Places And Other Stories
By Michael Carragher
(Blackstaff, £7.99)
Alarm bells should start ringing loudly as soon as one reads the long list of ‘Acknowledgements’ inside the front cover of this book, from which I will quote a short excerpt: ‘My colleagues and instructors here at the Writing Program of the University of Arkansas take a lot of credit for getting these stories right, some in particular: Gerard Donovan, Tommy Franklin, David Gavin, and David Pratt; Bill Harrison, Skip Hays, Michael Heffernan, Joanne Mescherry, Big Jim, and Brian Wilkie. Thanks, guys - and for the parties too. As the song says, it’s great to be part of something so good that’s lasting so long.’ However many ‘guys’ Carragher may thank, it won’t improve the quality of the stories in this collection.
‘Edgily positioned between the sophisticated present and the primitive, ‘thinly Christianised’ past, the stories in this powerful new collection draw their energy from the culture shock of new times, new places, shifting moralities’ the blurb on the back cover tells us. ‘Edgily’ is right, although I could find damn all evidence of that much vaunted sophistication. What we have here are thirteen stories which all, more or less, deal with an already laughably outmoded conception of machismo, the nature of violence, the meaning of honour, which results in a kind of down-market, sub-Hemingway for beginners. The only one which really crosses the present with the past is ‘Strange sounds from a far-off land’, in which an Irish lecturer at a minor American university is convinced that he hears the banshee wailing to warn of his father’s immanent death. Otherwise, most of the stories are set in the past, from World War One to the 1940s to the 1970s. Misogyny abounds, without really being examined. The best that could be said of some of the stories is that they are ‘dramatic’, particularly the title story, but it’s a drama of the ‘What’s going to happen next?’ variety, rather than an intellectual, emotional or sexual one. In general, Carragher seems to be trying to plough the ‘wild and cruel Irish past’ furrow, the kind of stuff currently being peddled by Michael Collins for the Irish-American market, which has about as much to do with Ireland today as the 1937 Constitution.
Sometimes one feels that there are simply too many people writing. Or, at least, getting published. But I suppose we should be grateful for Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and conclude that for Blackstaff, on this occasion, one out of two isn’t bad.
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