Lantern Slides: Stories

Twelve stories deal with love, incest, passion, aging, death, and loneliness

A nostalgic sense of place--sleepy moss-covered villages, grand houses, bleak seaside resorts--pervades these 12 enchanting tales by the accomplished author of The Country Girls Trilogy. O'Brien's passionate, voluble characters display a gift of Irish gab as rich as the teas and jamcakes they savor in their snug country parlors. Most are women and girls in various stages of loneliness, craving, love and regret, some on the edge of madness. The wild rambling of Eileen ("The Storm"), who accompanies her son and his girlfriend on a holiday, betrays the harsh tensions among the three. Maisie, the tempestuous narrator of "Brother," reveals her sensual bond with her sibling, and the murderous lengths to which she will go in order to hold him. In "What a Sky," a daughter visits her aged father in a nursing home and hears with chagrin of his fondness for a young nun there. Scandals keep the gossips twittering in "Dramas," about a gay grocer as aspiring actor; in "Widow," where the neighbors spy on shameless Bridget; and in " 'Oft in the Stilly Night,' " which logs the intimate doings of a town. The engaging voices in these stories often sound as self-absorbed as overheard soliloquies.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In the 30 years since O'Brien's acclaimed debut with The Country Girls, the regular production of her 17 subsequent volumes has fueled the predictable response that she is predictable. The core of her fiction does indeed work over the idea of a woman, usually Irish, embittered by society, usually Irish. But in the dozen stories here the author is wholly more interesting than the popular press's regular association of her with scandalous sexual candor. All narrators here are women, some characters and some omniscient. All combine well-studied weariness with refreshing toughness. The best of these stories compress multiple narratives into a sequence of cutting vignettes. The first, "Oft in the Stilly Night," charts various denizens of a village, and the last, the title story, mixes images from a single party. Originally most praised for novels, O'Brien may now be most prized for short stories. A superior sequel to the widely praised 1984 collection A Fanatic Heart .
- John P. Harrington, Cooper Union, New York
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.