Another stylish book from the consistently impressive Banshee Press sees Lucy Sweeney Byrne follow on from her impressive 2019 short story collection, Paris Syndrome, with Let’s Dance, a collection of 10 short stories of widely varying length.
The book is dominated by the title story, in which five colleagues working in tech sit around a Dublin two-bed doing coke while the infant daughter of the host couple sleeps in another room. It is a harshly believable account of the waves of joy, greed, envy, loneliness and paranoia that run through the mind of Kate, the narrator, as she waits for the stained table mat with its seemingly never-ending lines of cocaine to be passed around among the guests as they babble ever more obnoxious and incoherent virtue signalling nonsense about everything from the merits of oat milk to the future of cryptocurrency.
There are tremors of a young Bret Easton Ellis in the empty and drug-fuelled naming of consumer products overlaying a profound loneliness and inability to connect. They all want to be doing something else, somewhere else, but to go and work in the arts, as they dream about, won’t pay the bills and nor will it pay for “the copious amounts of cocaine and ketamine and MDMA and ecstasy and booze that they consumed at weekends, largely to counteract the dread of the oncoming week, in which they’d earn all that money again, to again buy drugs to make the prospect of the week after that bearable – and so forth”. It’s a grim but realistic account of a night in that ends as a night out.
And if cocaine does not provide a way out of the existential bind, nor does romance, love, sex or, God forbid, marriage. The collection is bookended by two brilliantly realised stories that act as warning parables against settling down: Night Classes has Emma trying to placate her wealthy, sulking, tedious Chicago lawyer husband; while Honey Valley concludes the book in a darkly claustrophobic tale narrated by a dying English woman, trapped in an Irish bungalow with her decaying husband.
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If all of this sounds dreary and depressing, it’s not: the writing is sharp and the darkness is frequently lit up by mordant, piercing humour.
Frank Shovlin is professor of Irish literature in English at the University of Liverpool
