FICTION: MOLLY McCLOSKEYreviews The China Factory By Mary Costello The Stinging Fly Press, 156pp. €12.99
WHEN REVIEWING a collection of short stories, it has been customary to begin by remarking on the precarious position of the form itself. While the novel stubbornly held its own against charges of, among other things, increasing irrelevance, the short story had come to be regarded as a frail beauty, and we spoke of it in hushed tones, as though on a death watch. It is a form that can offer the most sublime of reading pleasures, yet the story has, in an age of decreasing attention spans, curiously failed to ascend to prominence among the book-buying public.
At the same time, bizarrely large sums have been awarded to single stories, a situation that gives a boost to the winner, and the sponsor, but probably does little to sustain the story form itself. (The Sunday Times and EFG Private Bank have just awarded £30,000 to Kevin Barry; Davy Byrnes has sponsored an award for €25,000; and this newspaper is sponsoring a story competition with Powers Whiskey, with a €10,000 prize for 450 words on a prescribed theme.) Yet, in general, few phrases will freeze the heart of a publisher or agent like “short-story collection”.
And so it is gratifying to see story collections making something of a comeback – this latest, The China Factory, from Dublin’s Stinging Fly Press. The Stinging Fly magazine has been going since 1998, encouraging new writers and promoting the short-story form. In 2005, Declan Meade launched the Stinging Fly Press with the publication of Sean O’Reilly’s novel, Watermark. Since then he has brought out Kevin Barry’s debut collection, There Are Little Kingdoms (a Rooney Prize winner), and Life in the Universe, by Michael J Farrell. Now comes Mary Costello.
Costello’s work first appeared in the Sunday Tribune’s New Irish Writing. She was shortlisted for a Hennessy award. Although she continued to write (and teach full time), it was 15 years before she published again – this time in the Stinging Fly magazine, a break that led, eventually, to the publication of The China Factory.
On the whole, the stories concern themselves with those quiet cataclysms that reshape our most intimate worlds, something glimpsed or overheard, or a truth long within but never quite acknowledged. They are largely rural stories. There are pots of tea, the bleat of lambs, walks down the fields. But it is as much the restraint of the prose and its quiet rhythms that give the work a rural feel as it is the subject matter, not itself hugely reliant on the countryside. (Costello is from east Co Galway, trained at St Patrick’s in Drumcondra, and now lives in the Dublin suburbs.) Even those stories set in the city feel isolated from their surroundings, much as first-generation city-dwellers might.
A recurring theme is that of the disappointments embedded in long marriages, the unmet needs never voiced, the “secret thoughts, unspeakable yearnings”. There is a preponderance of middle-aged people shadowed by what is missing or lost in their lives. But while the stories are thematically and stylistically of a piece, and are all crafted with care, there are a few clear standouts. The very best of them have a dignity and a quiet confidence that bring to mind the stories of William Trevor.
One of the highlights is the title story, which concerns a teenage girl working in a china factory the summer before going off to university. The story draws back from explicit catastrophe to do the harder work of limning the guilt, sadness, loss and necessity of walking away from one life and beginning another.
“Sometimes in the months following I’d be sitting in a packed lecture hall and I’d think of the spongers at their tables and the water turning white in their basins and every minute and hour unfolding, interminably, day after day. I’d think of my own family in the warm kitchen at night with the noise and the arguments and the TV blaring and Gus, alone with his Western novels, finding fidelity in far-off men, and I’d think of his hand reaching out and touching Vinnie’s shoulder that day and the rarity of that, for Gus, the rarity of any human touch.”
Another beautiful story is Sleeping With a Stranger, in which scenes of a lonely marriage and a thwarted love (“He felt like a man in a novel – silent, obsessed, extreme in his love”) alternate with a man’s visits to his mother, wasting from Alzheimer’s in a nursing home: “He thought of her brain as being littered with a hail of tiny holes, like the spread of buckshot.”
In Little Disturbances, we see a man facing his impending death, noticing the world as never before. The Sewing Room, another strong story, begins in a time when an unplanned pregnancy had, for an unmarried woman, the power to derail her future. In 15 pages, we feel the breadth and depth of a life and its regrets.
In the stories that don’t quite come off, there is a lack of tension; it isn’t that nothing happens (nothing much happens in a lot of great stories), but either that the characters aren’t sufficiently realised to enable those small shifts to resonate or that what does happen hinges on contrived plot twists – a letter or a newspaper clipping implausibly stumbled on, an incriminating act seen through a window by someone arriving home early. These are mechanics, though, and rectifiable. The subtler underpinnings, the more intuitive capacities – the eye for detail, the feel for language, the care of it – are much in evidence.
Kudos to the Stinging Fly for its continued support of short-story writers. One hopes to read more of Mary Costello.
Molly McCloskey’s latest book is the memoir Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother, published by Penguin Ireland