A new selection of Frank O'Connor's stories arrives spoiling for a fight. Entitled Larry Delaney: Lonesome Genius, and published in Cork by an imprint called Killeen, it has been "arranged to read like an episodic novel", with stories about O'Connor's "alter ego" Larry Delaney put into an order that shows him "as he grows from boy to manhood".
That's from the back cover blurb, and I suppose it's a valid, if contentious, approach to the stories. However, that's not the fight I'm talking about, which occurs in Patrick Cotter's introduction.
Mr Cotter clearly believes that O'Connor's reputation has been unfairly maligned in recent decades, and this leads him into taking bizarre swipes at various other writers. Responding to the charge that O'Connor is "too traditional", Mr Cotter attacks Robert Coover's "avant garde" Pricksongs and Descants, declaring that "this primary achievement of American experimental short fiction is unreadable". Not to me it isn't ("The Babysitter" remains a dazzling and disturbing story), but who anyway would think of mentioning O'Connor and Coover in the same sentence?
And who would think of comparing actual writers with fictional characters? Mr Cotter would, and does: after asserting that O'Connor "has been compared disfavourably with the likes of Samuel Beckett", he declares that "Beckett never had to justify holding a book in his hand as Larry Delaney must do". Er, yes.
The swipes and the unsubstantiated assertions continue. We're told that "Roddy Doyle in particular displays the influence of O'Connor through his reliance on dialogue"; that when Francis Stuart accused O'Connor of being the soft centre of Irish writing he was acting as "nursemaid to a whole asylum of softheaded Irish literary critics"; and that O'Connor's "non pretentious, accessible" short stories "are hated by metropolitan professionals who would seek to deny anything Irish not derivative of mainstream European culture".
Frank O'Connor's cause isn't well served by such muddled paranoia. "In literary politics," Mr Cotter declares, "Dublin is the most provincial of world capitals." On the evidence of this diatribe, not half as provincial, I'd suggest, as Cork.
AMERICAN BORN London based and former Irish resident Douglas Kennedy shouldn't have too many financial worries in the future: the US publishing and movie rights for his second novel, The Big Picture, are about to net him $1.1 million.
Journalist and travel writer Kennedy was modestly rewarded, both critically and commercially, for his first fictional excursion, The Dead Heart, a thriller set in Australia, but American interest in this new book ("the novel I wanted to write," he says) sends his earnings into the stratosphere. Still, I'm sure he'll always regret his decision some years back to give up the day job as administrator of the Peacock theatre: there probably would have been a pension at the end of it.
THERE I was last week including Den is Staunton's profile of Edna O'Brien among the contenders for the Penny Perrick Paddywhackery Award, and now along comes Peter Conrad with a profile of Edna that puts Mr Staunton's to shame.
Some months back in the Independent on Sunday, Mr Conrad wrote a piece about Roddy Doyle that was full of the most extraordinary Oirishry. Well, he was at it again in the same paper last Sunday, and I only wish I had the space to do him justice.
A few examples must suffice. Edna is "a volatile creature, easily alarmed and aroused: an Aeolian harp of a woman through whom emotion sends shocks and surges of energy". At one moment she was "shuddering deliciously", the next she was "clutching my shoulders and tickling my ear with a zephyr from County Clare". Then (oh, don't ask) "she began to make slithery motions up and down her chest."
As for her hands: "She has the most loquacious hands I have ever seen ... Her cupped hands seemed to be supporting swollen breasts ... Her hands fluttered round her head like a flock of starlings, as I imagined myself turned inside out, soaking into her amber rug, blotting the crimson walls of her sittings room.
What is it about Edna O'Brien that reduces male interviewers to gibbering idiots?
BARGAINS are still to be found in the basement of Eason's in O'Connell Street, though not nearly as many now as there were a few months ago. However, I came across Maurice Harmon's fine Sean O Faolain: A Life, published by Constable in 1994, at £17.50 and now available in its original hardback at £6.95. And I also snapped up The Guinness Television Encyclopaedia, which is full of fascinating basic information for tellybuffs like myself, and which is reduced from £14.99 to £4.95.
In Books Upstairs I found four original hardback bargains Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride (£6.99), Neil Jordan's Sunrise with Sea Monsters (£5.99), Aidan Mathews's Lipstick on The Host (£4.99), and Paul Durcan's A Snail in My Prime: New and Selected Poems (£7.99).
All these are a steal. So, too, in Wicklow Street's The Secret Book and Record Store was an original 1960 edition (in perfect condition) of the English translation of Lampedusa's great novel, The Leopard, at £3.50. And there also I seized, for £6.50, a first edition of Put Money in The Purse, Micheal MacLiammoir's inimitable 1952 account of the making of Orson Welles's Othello. It pays to browse.