Essential artists of the normal

SHORT STORIES: HEATHER INGMANreviews Davy Byrnes Stories: The Six Prize-Winning Stories from the 2009 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award. As selected by Richard Ford,The Stinging Fly Press, 149pp, €9.99

THE NARRATOR of Éilís Ní­ Dhuibhne's story Oleanderdescribes the short stories of the American writer Richard Ford as "Stories that linger over the coffee, take their time". Ford's ability to slow life down, to compel his readers to take notice of details that might otherwise escape their notice makes him an ideal choice of judge for an Irish short story competition, since the Irish short story, in its most distinctive form, is understated, concerned with the small details of everyday life, often looking backwards rather than forward.

“Be artists of the normal,” Michael McLaverty wrote in 1952, “it is the normal that survives, and it comes from exploring the resources of your own people and your environment – no matter how small the latter is, if it is deeply pondered the resultant work will overleap its boundaries.” This sounds like a blueprint for the way in which the Irish short story would develop in the hands of writers such as Mary Lavin, John McGahern, William Trevor and indeed the winner of the second Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, Claire Keegan.

The Davy Byrnes competition is Ireland’s biggest competition for a single short story. Founded with the aim of honouring the tradition of story writing in Ireland, it’s a hugely important encouragement to our best writers to continue working in a form that has been so closely entwined with Ireland’s view of itself.

In his judge's report on the competition, Richard Ford resists the notion of national literature. It is ironic, therefore, that his search for "the most excellent story" resulted in the choice of such a quintessentially Irish story as Keegan's Foster. The themes of Fosterare recognisably Keegan territory: rural Ireland, a fractured family, daily life touched by a hint of the supernatural. Keegan trusts the everyday to create sufficient tension to carry the reader along and her ear for dialogue is unerringly accurate. As always she takes a risk in setting her story back in time, in an Ireland that is barely recognisable any more, if one were to go by newspapers and the television. This ought to be a drawback but somehow it isn't. Social commentary can safely be left to the media. The pleasures to be found in this story are all to do with language and with what Ford calls "a high-wire act of uncommon narrative virtuosity". Fosteris a perfectly achieved, aesthetically satisfying story that pays to be read with the same kind of painstaking attention to detail that the writer surely afforded it. The collection is worth investing in for this story alone.

The power of suggestion propels several of the other stories in this collection as they evoke a larger tale than the one being recounted. In Storm Glass, Kathleen Murray summons up in a few pages a remarkably dense hinterland of a dead mother, a lost daughter and the need for those left behind to survive in any way they can.

The Rescue, Susan Stairs's story of a boy, a girl, a bedroom and a weapon, conjures up a bleak story of alienated and neglected youth in a manner that recalls the early Ian McEwan.

Mary Leland's Living in the Unknownis as much about the narrator's loss of her job and her family as it is about her ageing father and the story broadens out to encompass several transitions – from competence to senility, from secure social status to unemployment, from the safety of being wife and mother to living in the unknown, a feat not as yet accomplished by the narrator who ends the story still looking for a way to survive.

Not all the stories are set in Ireland: Molly McCloskey's This Isn't Heavenis narrated by an Irish aid worker in Somalia. The story portrays what newspaper reports can't, namely the interior landscape of an aid worker's daily life and the way it changes over time till eventually the revelation comes that, despite rookie ideals about changing things, and no matter how tragic and extreme the political situation, it is always the personal life that counts.

Eoin McNamee's evocatively titled story, The Road Wife, also portrays from the inside a story more usually read about in newspapers: long-haul truck drivers, illegal immigrants, Eastern European prostitutes, a landscape familiar from his story North of Riga. The Road Wifeevokes deftly and with precision the sad, tawdry details of lives lived perpetually in transit.

Ford remarks in his introduction that wit, gay Irishmen and recent Irish immigrants are significant omissions from these stories. We know from reading Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín and Roddy Doyle that the Irish short story is capable of dealing with all of these topics. There are only six stories here, but they cover a range of Irish lives, from the elderly and middle-aged to Susan Stairs’s bitter young people and Keegan’s bewildered child.

The collection will interest all devotees of the form. Ford’s brilliantly insightful comments on each of the stories and the authors’ own explanations of how their stories evolved make the collection essential reading for anyone starting out as a writer today.

Heather Ingman lectures in the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin. She has published novels and academic studies. Her most recent book, A History of the Irish Short Story, is published by Cambridge University Press