In one of the numerous self-reflexive moments in Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's new volume of short stories, The Pale Gold of Alaska and Other Stories, an emotionally bruised heroine fantasises about the publicity shots of Richard Ford while also musing about his reinvention of the short story. By ignoring dictates about brevity and the need for epiphanies, she realizes that he writes "stories with flesh on their bones, stories that linger over the coffee". In her imaginings, the perfect story teller and the perfect lover fuse.
Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's third collection of short stories is likewise an exploration of eros and the possibilities of narrative. A succession of spare, probing yet lyrical tales outline the complexities and improprieties of love. Like Richard Ford and Alice Munro, with whom she has much in common, Ni Dhuibhne displays her consummate mastery of and willingness to experiment with the short story form that can so often seem artificial and contrived.
She endows her narratives with a capaciousness that allows them to delve beneath the surfaces of things and to sound the profundities of her protagonists' emotions. Rather than rushing towards a predictable ending, these are indeed stories that take their time and surprise the reader with their unexpected tangents and detours.
The emphasis throughout is on the intricacies of female desire and the division between outer appearances and the lived confusion of sexual relationships. Ni Dhuibhne invents a varied array of heroines whose voices she captures with an empathy that is always leavened with a distancing irony, including a prostitute in Dublin's Monto, an emigrant to a mining community in the wilderness of Montana, a television producer on a romantic tryst in Siena and a mother coping with teenage children while on holiday in Kerry. The stories uncover the delicate checks and balances of individual quests for elusive moments of passion.
Moral and emotional dilemmas abound. In Ni Dhuibhne's finely observed view of things, the contortions of human relationships rarely lend themselves to neat patterns or tidy endings. Many of the women in these tales battle to explain why they find consolation in furtive and emotionally depleting affairs. The psychology of love is shown always to be at odds with social convention and narrative expectations. In the title tale, "The Pale Gold of Alaska", the heroine - in defiance of her husband's jealous possessiveness - falls in love with a Blackfoot Indian, while in "At Sally Gap" the protagonist in the aftermath of her mother's funeral suddenly discovers her capacity for pleasure when she sleeps with her brother-in-law, although in the process she must also face up to her sister's deep-seated hatred of her.
The multi-layered structures of Ni Dhuibhne's stories defy any attempt to summarize them. In the final story, "The Banana Boat", a mother during a family outing to the beach at Castlegregory is plunged into despair when she fears that her teenage son has been drowned. Instead of the anticipated tragic ending, we are offered an entangled web of conclusions. The heroine realizes that the "uneventful" life she leads is out of literary fashion and will never be described in a book. Ni Dhuibhne's graceful, scintillating and innovative collection pulls off the impossible feat of spinning stories that do not depend on plots and events but concentrate instead on the all-absorbing contradictions of female experience and emotion.
Anne Fogarty lectures in the Department of English, University College Dublin