A good novella should be as compact and elegant as a perfect cocktail and pack just such a punch. Miniatures like Nabokov's Trans stories. The late Mary Lavin very correctly and beautifully described the short story as "an arrow in flight" but the novella has both feet on the ground. It is a magnifying glass on complex corners of the world. The success of the form depends on perfect focus. In the right hands it is infinitely superior to many of the pretentious and overweight novels being written today. It would be difficult to find the equal of the short works mentioned above but The Visitor (discovered after the author's death as an 80-page typescript) merits a place in their company. As a study of loneliness and monstrous selfishness, it stands on its own. Anastasia returns to Dublin shortly after the death of her mother in Paris. Like a wounded animal burrowing blindly for shelter, she scurries back to the house where she was born. But her father is dead and the house is now run by her grandmother, who sees in the frightened young girl a chance to avenge her resentment of the woman who took her son away and then left him, and the child who took this woman's part. The word "lonely" tolls like a solitary bell through the pages. Brennan doesn't just write about loneliness: she inhabits it; she exhibits it. The shy, the dispossessed, are seen not quite in the world but teetering on some perilous rim of it, from where they cannot possibly keep their balance but have a unique view. The painful self-consciousness of her characters is reflected in a constant feel of watchfulness. Inanimate objects have their own sinister life. "The street lamps," she writes, "drew flat circles of light around them and settled down for the night." Later, when the streets are emptied (and therefore safe) and the rain comes down, the view is more light-hearted as the same circles of light "changed to shining pools of darkness and made crooked mirrors for faraway stars". Brennan's great skill is never to exaggerate, never emphasise. The writing is plain and pared to the bone. Anastasia's unhappiness, like a child's or an animal's, earns no dramatic description. It is there for the reader to pick up and experience its searing chill. It is her monumental lack of judgment and her disorientation. She sees someone in the street who looks like her mother, follows her into a shop and asks the assistant: "have you seen my mother?" Panic-stricken, she then decides she cannot leave her dead parent in a shop and scurries to a church. The novel is also a hymn to selfishness. In the grandmother, Maeve Brennan has created one of the great monsters of modern Irish fiction. Mrs King is never unmannerly or ill-tempered. She is a patient predator who feeds daintily on the fears of the vulnerable, assisting them with quiet pleasure to blunder into self-destruction. It is Brennan's great skill that she then endows the heroine with her own brand of selfishness. When another despairing soul, Miss Kilbride, asks of her a dying request, Anastasia is too self-absorbed to carry it out. There are echoes of two other great Irish writers here - Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor. Both are masters of the emotional dislocation and mannered spite that are part of a certain class in Irish life. But while those consummately skilled authors convey their themes with irony and sophistication, Brennan's work is an unadorned and intimate engagement with despair. The most sociable and popular reader cannot claim to be unfamiliar with this emotion after reading this short book. There are some flaws in this exquisite novella. The word "lonely" appears several times too often. Christopher Carduff, its editor, has undoubtedly ironed out a few more defects. But, as with Maria Callas, the singularity of Maeve Brennan's voice owns its imperfections and in spite of them and along with them, the book is a miniature masterpiece.
Clare Boylan is a novelist and short story writer. Her Collected Stories has just been published by Abacus, £7.99
The Visitor by Maeve Brennan is available through Internet bookstores