Saints and Sinners

January 24, 2011
O'Brien (The Light of Evening) mixes her trademark lyricism with a brutal depiction of lives marred by violence, whether a pining lover whose life has been upended or a dreamer whose fate leads him to a cold death in the wild. "Sinners" depicts one night in the life of a fusty innkeeper whose prudish disgust at a trio of guests is slowly revealed to have roots in her own loneliness. In "Black Flower" a former prison art teacher drives to the countryside with a newly released veteran of Ireland's freedom fights—and a likely target for revenge. The narrator of "Plunder" is a young girl caught in a civil war who describes cowering in fear and her torments at the hands of the enemy. Another young girl narrates "Green Georgette" and endures the emotional hardship of class divisions, while in "Send My Roots Rain" a woman sits in a Dublin hotel lobby awaiting a reclusive poet and thinks back on love affairs and disappointments. And in "Manhattan Medley" a transplant to the big city begins an affair with a man and describes in rich prose how it has permeated her life. Throughout, tragedy mingles with beauty, yearning with survival, and destruction with moments of grace.

April 1, 2011

We feel that we know O'Brien's displaced characters, like Rafferty, of Donegal, from the opening story "Shovel Kings," who in his youth joined hundreds of other able-bodied Irishmen digging the trenches for London's Underground and, sinking into late middle age and still in London, slowly downs his Guinness at Billy Mulligan's Pub. O'Brien's women, who usually own the first-person narrative, are likewise unforgettable. Funny, smart, rueful, and unlucky in love, they wait in Dublin hotel lobbies and wander through foreign cities. One unnamed narrator, in the story "Manhattan Medley," tells us, "Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair...in a forest or a cornfield...somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In the city there are places to remind us of what has been." VERDICT In her best stories, O'Brien conveys the trajectory of a life so seamlessly that we almost forget these are words on a page. Her longtime readers will be pleased, and those encountering her stories for the first time will be grateful for a wonderful find. [See Prepub Alert, 11/15/10.]--Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2011
The world, if viewed in clich'd terms, is indeed populated by the two types of individuals cited in the title of this new collection of short stories by the doyenne of contemporary Irish literature, an acknowledged master of the form. But that is all that is clich'd about this splendid book. Witness the story Send My Roots Rain. Miss Gilhooley is a small-town librarian in provincial Ireland who arranges a first-time meeting in Dublin with her favorite poet, who, with no word left anywhere, simply does not show up, leaving Miss Gilhooley to get back on the bus and go back home, defeated. But OBrien renders this character sympathetic, not pathetic, avoiding stereotype altogether. In the staggering Black Flower, OBrien reaches into the recent Irish past to capture, in brief pages but intense comprehension of the psychology involved, the long grim chain of reprisals resulting from the bloody triangle of British, Protestant, and Catholic political interests and programs. Eleven stories in total bring literary lovers rapt attention to this authors clear, immaculate style and her brilliant selection of detail, nimble plot construction, and astute character delineation. Recommend OBrien along with William Trevor and Alice Munro. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Winner of both Irish and American literary awards, OBrien will be featured on NPRs Selected Shorts at Symphony Space in New York on May 25, 2011; she will be granting interviews in print, online, and on the radio; and print advertising will appear in the New Yorker, where OBrien is frequently published.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)