If ever a book of short stories could be accused of lulling the reader into a cosy sense of safe territory before unleashing harsh splendours, here it is. The Dublin-born Maeve Brennan moved to Washington DC as a teenager because of her diplomat father's career. Eventually the family returned to Ireland but she chose to remain. Having settled in New York, she joined the New Yorker as a working columnist and fiction writer. It might be tempting to say the rest is history - except for the fact that Brennan was to remain one of Irish literature's best-kept secrets. Unknown in Ireland, she is not even included in Boylan's comprehensive Dictionary of Irish Biography, nor is she in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. She died in 1993 at 76, having spent most of her final 20 years in a haze of mental breakdown. Divided into three story sequences and taking its title from the final story, a novella of terrifying power, the book opens with gentle, memoir-like pieces recalling scenes from a Dublin childhood in which Ranelagh acquires a life of its own. These first person narratives are vivid, if unremarkable. Then the mood and tone shifts dramatically as Brennan explores the sad, pathetic marriage of the Derdons, a couple living in a cold war created by mutual resentments. Rose is embittered by her son's abandoning of her. He became a priest. Meanwhile her petty husband has come to hate everything about her, even the way she eats. The six work as a novel and are all superb, particularly "Family Walls". The final sequence tells the sad story of Delia Bagot, devoted to her children and house but shunned by a disengaged husband. The title story is a masterpiece. At her best, and there are a dozen excellent stories here, Brennan stands alongside her New Yorker mentor William Maxwell, who died recently, as well as Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Alice Munro, John McGahern and William Trevor. Her genius lies not in her language but in her subtle understatement.
