The Hour After Happy Hour by Mary O’Donoghue: stories about Irish emigrant lives and those left behind

The author and poet Mary O’Donoghue grew up in Co Clare but has lived for a number of years in the United States, where she teaches literature. The stories gathered in The Hour After Happy Hour – O’Donoghue’s first prose fiction publication since her 2010 debut novel, Before the House Burns – are mostly about Irish expats in anglophone countries, and their family and friends back home. A widow in Ennis follows her son’s exploits in Australia on social media: “She doesn’t understand all the talk about experiencing things, flinging somewhere far, doing something daft, taking a photo. Never shutting up about it ... ” An academic arranges an online reunion with some old pals: “We were growing older and more wan, like endives or the fat Belgian asparagus.”

Many of these characters have been in some way left behind: by children who have emigrated, lovers who have moved on, or spouses who have passed away. In Safety Advice for Staying Indoors, a farmer who lost his wife to a road traffic accident watches reality TV with his teenage daughter. In At the Super 7, a man who had been dating a single mum tries, after the amicable breakup of that relationship, to maintain ties with her young son; it’s nothing sinister, just a bit sad – his efforts would continue “until such time as the little man was the one to say no”. The story features a rather lovely description of the boy’s chubbiness in the period prior to his growth spurt, when he “had the bready paleness of City Hall men ... who ate lunch specials at the food courts”.

The protagonist of Mavis-de-Fleur endures an awkward video call with her errant son, whom she “loved ... like the mothers of fugitive criminals must do, in silent pride, in the nasty secret hope that someone decades hence might turn them in for cash money”. We are told, in passing, that her neighbours “had sex at times she’d expect but exercised in disconcerting off-hours”. In the Inn District is an unnerving story about an Irish woman in an abusive sadomasochistic relationship with an American man. He sits in the room, just out of shot, during her video call with her mum and dad: “My father said he had an awful notion there was a control freak nearby, telling me what to say.”

The themes are gloomy enough – loneliness, ageing, distance and disconnection – but the wry sardonicism and bathetic asides keep the reader’s spirits up

A playful enjoyment in words and language permeates the collection. Characters are tickled by funny placenames – Australia’s Mount Buggery in one story, Massachusetts’ Cuttyhunk Island in another. A protagonist muses on the oddness of “remote” working as a term: “The word had northerly extremes. I could set up a syllabus in the boreal forest or run a meeting on an oil rig.” Elsewhere a narrator takes a Russian lover who was “given to Britishisms, and they came out when he was at his most serious. Gosh. A bitter pill. Agog ... I pictured a small musty bedroom ... a single shelf stacked and bowed by Jeeves and Bertie.” When the aforementioned Ennis widow embarks on a tentative foray into online dating, she makes an active effort not to fixate on an embarrassing malapropism in a message from a would-be suitor; it’s partly a matter of generosity, but also poignantly emblematic of the compromises enforced by loneliness.

‘My partner will not give up meeting people for sex. I feel enormous rejection’

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The collection is bookended by The Rakes of Mallow, a story split into two parts recounting, in the first person plural, the life cycle of a whole generation of Irish emigrants who came of age in the late 1990s. First up, youth: “We waited on steps and in offices for grants to come through. We drank Scrumpy and Buckie and Lambrusco Rosso when the grants ran dry.” They move abroad to make their money, and return intermittently to attend funerals: “We shook the hands of strangers with ancestrally familiar faces. We bought them the pricey whisky.” Tracklistings are as important in volumes of short fiction as they are in pop albums, and this arrangement cleverly reinforces a sense of thematic unity.

The themes are gloomy enough – loneliness, ageing, distance and disconnection – but the wry sardonicism and bathetic asides keep the reader’s spirits up. There are unlikely moments of quiet grace, such as when a man happens across a funeral service while carrying “a sweating bag of chicken, a drumstick raised to his mouth. He lowered it slowly, and fastidiously he folded it back in the bag. He bowed his head and moved on.” Despite their plangent timbre, the stories evince a sanguine, almost serene take on the general messiness of these scattered lives. In Late Style, a divorced couple announce their decision to get re-engaged, prompting one of their friends to declare that “remarriage to the same person was like an artist’s late style ... Disharmonious, catastrophic even. And thus modern!”