The Rose Garden: Short Stories - Softcover

Brennan, Maeve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1582431191 ISBN 13: 9781582431192

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2001

Synopsis

Reading Maeve Brennan is like watching a master jeweler construct a ticking watch from an array of tiny, inanimate parts. -Linda Barrett Osborne, New York Times Book ReviewSo good that I kept putting the book down to savor a description or perfect phrase, to hug myself with malicious joy, and to put off the evil hour when the stories would be done. -Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday GlobeWhen The Springs of Affection was published in 1997, the poet Eamon Grennan called it a classic, a book that placed Maeve Brennan among the best Irish short-story writers since Joyce. The Rose Garden gathers the rest of her short fiction, some of it set in her native Dublin but most of it in and around her adopted Manhattan. The riches here are many, but the collection's centerpiece is a suite of satirical scenes from suburban life, stories a little meaner than Cheever's, and wittier than Updike's (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

About this title

Review:

Addictive tales from a rediscovered mid-century master. Or maybe the more appropriate word would be mistress, since The Rose Garden is crammed to the rafters with maids and their mistresses. Maeve Brennan, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, shows herself thoroughly in control of her fictive house in this posthumous reissue of stories from the 1950s through the '70s. Each is a witty, mean little miracle of lost chances and bruised egos. The first five stories are set in the town of Herbert's Retreat, an arty, expensive enclave on the Hudson, based on Sneden's Landing where Brennan lived for several years with her husband, New Yorker managing editor St. Clair McKelway. The Herbert's Retreat stories are linked entertainments, compulsively readable, and worthy of the adoration inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Basil and Josephine" stories. Like Fitzgerald, Brennan limns shattering loss and hilariously sends up middle-class pretentions--sometimes within the space of the same sentence. A pompous New York critic imposes his finicky will on the good wives of the community; a favorite son returns a broken man and finds that only the maids will dance with him; a bum passing through leaves his rather stinky mark.

Every character, above stairs and below, lives for the delight of recounting the disasters and drunks of the night before. The afternoon before the servants' annual dance, "jaded with talking about the dance, anxious now only to get on with it, willing even to have it past, so that they could start enjoying the discussion of it, most of the maids at Herbert's Retreat lay down on their beds for an unaccustomed ceremonial nap before getting dressed for the evening." The closed community and its inhabitants' transparent attempts to dominate each other recall E.F. Benson's utterly delightful Lucia series.

The Rose Garden is rounded out with several of Brennan's acclaimed stories of bereft Dublin life, a couple of experimental, stream-of-consciousness pieces, and, of all things, a handful of dog stories. Her forays into the interior life of her Labrador, Bluebell, might read as twee indulgences, except they're so rife with breathtaking, careful observation:

That was an unearthly morning--one mislaid at the beginning of the world and recovered in East Hampton under a high and massive sky of Mediterranean blue.... The wind was so new that it blew cold, in its first rush across the world, but the air was soft. The pheasant's head and body were almost buried in the powdery sand, but he had fallen with his wings wide open, and one of them slanted up to make a wedge of color in the air.

Such quiet, perfect sentences stud Maeve Brennan's stories. This is a book full of intelligent diversions, a book that makes a good, lasting sound. --Claire Dederer

About the Author:

Maeve Brennan (1917-1993) left Ireland for America when she was seventeen, and was for more than thirty years a staff writer at The New Yorker. Counterpoint published her posthumously discovered novella, The Visitor, in 00/09.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1582431191
• ISBN 13: 9781582431192
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320