Collected Stories of Frank O'Connor

That realism has a natural humor which needs no embellishment or exaggeration seems to be the guiding principle of the fiction of Frank O'Connor, whose nearly seventy short stories of the lower and middle class in Ireland, many of which were originally published in the New Yorker at a time when the magazine was the authority for the best new short fiction, are gathered in this collection published by Vintage. His settings are localized to villages and towns; his stories, unlike the plays of Sean O'Casey, give little indication of the Irish political situation of the twentieth century, rarely even mentioning the World Wars, and instead focus primarily on religion, marriage, and childhood. O'Connor's portrayals of the church and the clergy, ranging from the slyly satirical to the somberly sympathetic, illuminate the influence of Catholicism on the Irish mentality and the often strained relationships between priests and their parishioners. In "News for the Church," a teenage girl goes to confession for carnal intercourse with an older man, but the priest cynically guesses she is merely brandishing a badge of honor to prove her sexual maturity to her married older sister. O'Connor sees the unrewarding side to being a moral compass, but he never suggests that a priest's work is all in vain. Many of the stories are about the confusion of youth and are narrated by a child with the voice of an adult. "The Man of the House," for example, struck me as a quasi-parable of the Fall, an adult-oriented parody of a morality tale that is told to children: A boy (the narrator) is entrusted by his sick mother to procure for her a bottle of cough syrup, but a bewitching girl he meets at the drug store tricks him into sharing the temptingly sweet medicine with her, leaving him to face the consequences of his mischief. These stories tend to culminate in poignant moments that, while not exactly equaling the Joycean epiphanies of "Dubliners," resonate with aching truthfulness. One of the most pointed stories explores a curious contrast between the Irish and the English: In "The Sentry," an Irish priest with a Catholic parish in England during World War II discovers an English soldier stealing onions from his garden and challenges the man to a fistfight. When the priest later learns that the soldier--a sentry--could be shot for deserting his post, he tells this to an Irish nun, who replies, "Isn't that the English all out? The rich can do what they like, but a poor man can be shot for stealing a few onions!" Of course, the point is that the soldier would be shot for deserting his post, not for stealing onions; but the subtext of the nun's statement is that the Irish tend to see the bigger picture.O'Connor is a natural dramatist with an uncommon ear for sincere, fluidly colloquial dialogue; he never overdoes a situation because he trusts the inherent strength and vitality of his characters to draw our interest. Here we have a collection of people who deline

Generally, when it comes to literature, I'm fairly hard to please. That being said, I love this book without reservation. I've recommended it to and foisted it on friends for years now. Many of them react much the way I do: there isn't anyone else like Frank O'Connor. The stories are lyrical, sharply and humorously observed, and told with elegance in an easy but precise idiomatic diction. O'Connor always gave his work the test of being read aloud, and this care for the sound and cadence of his prose shows on every page. Then, there is O'Connor's feeling for people. Reading the stories, one gets the impression that he was an intelligent but fundamentally kindly, generous man. Even when a character in the stories does something that seems objectionable, O'Connor never loses sight of that character's humanity. There is no absence of modernist irony, and the irony can sting (as in "The Mad Lomasneys"), but it is never cruel. O'Connor's stories take place in Ireland, but they are not circumscribed by a desire to depict Irish regional color or romantic notions about the place. He wrote what he knew and understood, and what he understood was the people he grew up with. If that makes him a regionalist, then so were Faulkner and John Millington Synge. In his own subtle way, O'Connor was a realist, and ultimately, these stories are universal: they touch places in the psyche and the human heart that are common to us all. Any selection of one's "favorite" stories will be personal. To an interested reader, I would say, "Read them all." To friends who ask, I add that they should start with "Guests of the Nation" and "First Confession." These aren't his "best" stories, but I've always liked them both, they are typical of his best, and one must start somewhere. When I've given 5 stars to a book, I've often had to argue with myself as to whether it deserved it. Not for this one.

There is a line from William Trevor (no stranger to the short story) on the back of the book that I think is highest praise that one writer can give another: "without adornment, he simply tells the truth." We don't demand things so weighty from books anymore, and are probably likely to dismiss a person or a book that promises it, but I think the word at least gets at O'Connor's idea of a short story. The truth, for him, is a live person on paper, going through a period of his or her life where they understand something about either themselves or the world. When he taught writing, he insisted that his students write a one-sentence theme for their story: what is it saying, demonstrating - what truth is it getting at?This seems an old-fashioned idea of the story, but nothing about O'Connor's work seems either old-fashioned or excessively schematic - his stories are as alive as writing can be while still having unity and weight, and they carry their truth with humor and humanity. The Richard Ellman introduction, I'm afraid, misses this completely. Ellman was a friend of O'Connor's in later life, but I don't think he understands his work very well. The introduction makes O'Connor sound like some sort of genial provincial, with the primary virtue of his work being a portrait of a vanished society.But no writer of fiction who is just a chronicler can survive: it doesn't matter that today Anna and Karenin could simply divorce. The book is relevant because Anna and Karenin are both real on the page, as so many of O'Connor's characters are. Ellman's lack of understanding influences his selection: too many of O'Connor's later less inspired work is here, and many wonders are missing. Why did he leave off In the Train, for example? Sadly, this is the only collection that's in print, but most of the great stories are here, and they are inexhaustible.After discovering this book, I immediately went out and read everything of O'Connor's I could find, including a biography, and I copied down a passage that I think shows the way in which he looked at people and the world. He was writing to a friend who had been estranged from his wife, and was now feeling extreme remorse as she was dying:"On occasions like this we all feel guilt and remorse; we all want to turn back time; but even if we were able, things would go on in precisely the same way because the mistakes we make are not in our judgements but in our natures. It is only when we do violence to our natures that we are justified in our regrets, and neither of us is capable of that. We are what we are and within our limitiations we have made our efforts. They may seem puny in the light of eternity but they didn't at the time, and they weren't."This is his truth: to discover people's natures, to see the essential in even the smallest actions, and get across the moments when people see themselves whole. Read this book: it's one to keep for life.

The tradition of the Irish story teller has been reborn in this century in her marvelous short story writers. None was finer than Corkman, Frank O'Connor. All of O'Connor's classic stories are here. O'Connor truly captures Irish life in the early part of this century. The wit and humor that are legendary among Corkmen is present throughout this book. This is one of my favorite books ever. I have given it as a gift too many times to count. Every person that I gave it to came back raving about it!

Frank O'Connor is likely our time's and our language's best at telling the short story. Don't miss "First Confession" or "The Drunkard."You don't have to be Irish to recognize the pattern and rhythm of life and speech in his stories. They capture a place and time perfectly, but yet transcend the confinements of culture or period.