The Art of the Glimpse: Endlessly interesting selection of short stories

The Art of the Glimpse

Author: Sinead Gleeson

ISBN-13: 978-1788548809

Publisher: Apollo

Guideline Price: £25

I imagine the work of editing this collection must have been both delightful and maddening. The need to choose precisely 100 stories is a challenge: they can’t all be of the same quality, so where to set the bar of literary quality? What other attributes matter, and how are they to be weighed?

The word “anthology” comes from the Greek for “flowers”, and 18th-century collections of stories and essays were sometimes called a “nosegay” or a “posy”, with the implication that the bouquet is more than the sum of its parts, that the art of the arrangement is the point of the volume. The stories must make a pattern, say together more than each says alone.

Almost every story here has been previously published elsewhere, so the achievement is in the relationships between the texts, in the complexity and conversations created by proximity. Short stories are often collected by national identity, as if the genre has a distinctive form of citizenship or relation to the nation state, and so here we have Ireland in 2020. The collection, any collection of writing by country, alerts us again to the awkward question of the extent to which art has a nationality.

Is the Irish short story different from the American or Australian short story? What makes a story Irish: its setting, the author’s passport, the author’s place of birth or residence? In the case of at least one writer here, the author’s parents’ place of birth? Sinéad Gleeson seems to have gone, sensibly and inclusively, for the author’s stated allegiance.

There are two likely groups of readers: established followers of Irish literature and those looking for an introduction. The former may be reassured but not excited to see Joyce, Beckett, Bowen and Le Fanu included; for the latter this collection could be an accessible first taste of writers considered “difficult”.

For those who recognise most of the names on the back – a rollcall of contemporary Irish prose that made me think the list of possible reviewers without a conflict of interest might be rather brief – there will still be new discoveries, not only in the work of emerging writers but in all-but-lost stories from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

If the art of the anthology editor is indeed comparable to that of the florist, Gleeson’s alphabetical ordering seems at first brutal. Barry and Beckett, maybe, but Bram Stoker and Deirdre Sullivan? At first, as a newcomer to this country, I wanted chronological order so I could see literary development and historical progress, an overall narrative I could compare to the English one I know.

But as I read, I began to see themes and patterns weaving across and between the stories in ways that no linear order could capture or create, and I suspect that different readers and maybe different readings will find different patterns. Since the stories can’t orbit each other, alphabetical order began to seem pleasingly dissociative, like not letting kids sit next to their best friends in the interest of wider social cohesion.

Loss of place

For me, the emerging themes were the love and loss of place, emigration, labour and hunger, domestic violence, marital infidelity, gang war and the crimes and consolations of the Catholic Church. (Perhaps this list is at least a partial answer to question about what makes a story Irish or not, but there are also of course reflections on love and death and sex and all the things everyone writes about all over the world.) I began to think that the stories were harmonising with each other, echoing the same melody in a different key, playing an unexpected variation.

In the earlier stories, such as Rosa Mulholland’s The Hungry Death and Katharine Tynan’s The Sea’s Dead, the sea is terrifying, an inescapable danger to fishermen and migrants driven to ships by poverty and hunger. Women left behind regard it with fear and dismay. By the mid-20th century, in Elizabeth Cullinan’s The Swim, the beach is where young men and women might meet, glimpse each other’s bodies, away from the surveillance of the church, and the water is for sport.

The more Romantic attitudes to landscape seem to fade into modernity, later stories more concerned with urban life, but again the alphabetical order allows narratives counter to historical inevitability.

Across the two centuries of the modern short story are tales of infidelity, from Anne Enright’s suburban swingers and Mary Costello’s nostalgic rural teacher to Bryan MacMahon’s forgiving cuckold. In the writing of sex, ordinary lives don’t conform to ordinary expectations (perhaps these miniature, private rebellions against mainstream mores are why the short story has an affinity for adulterers).

Having read several stories about male brutality, I liked the twist in MacMahon’s Exile’s Return, but in fact most of the stories about violent masculinity insist on the damaged humanity of the dangerous man. In Colm Keegan’s Drown Town, a fight breaks out in a club and people end up drunk in the Liffey at night, but the writing is joyfully energetic. Kevin Barry’s The Girls and Dogs is beautifully sad for its degraded and frightening narrator (though Blindboy Boatclub’s Scaphism struck me as merely unpleasant).

The surprises

My favourites are the surprises, the lesser-known old stories and the new voices. In Una Troy’s The Apple, a middle-aged nun from a previously closed order is allowed to look in through the window of her childhood home as she travels “the road by her own sea, her own rocks and cliffs, her own shining strand”. Sentimental stuff, but also poignant.

At the other end of the collection’s spectrum, Melatu Uche Okorie’s story about a young Irish writer of colour presenting her story about a young Irish writer of colour to a writing workshop is sharp and understated: “temper the racism she experienced with examples of kind behaviour”, her readers advise.

It’s not the writer’s job to comfort the comfortable, and this collection is wide-ranging and endlessly interesting in its explorations.