Good Trouble by Joseph O’Neill – Poised comedy and subtle psychology

Good Trouble

Author: Joseph O’Neill

ISBN-13: 978-0008283995

Publisher: 4th Estate

Guideline Price: £12.99

Arriving in the old Tuscan city of Siena, Robert Daly has nothing to do until the “eve-of-wedding” reception of his old Darmouth College roommate Mark Walters, who has been living in London for a few years and is about to marry “an English girl with a thrilling name – Electra”. This isn’t Mark’s first marriage – his first wife, Jane, died shortly after they were married, and “is buried in England, far from home, because she expected that Mark would be buried with her”. When Robert is wandering the streets of Siena’s old city, he stops in an internet cafe to kill time, checks his email, and is distracted by a headline on the home page: “5,000-Year-Old Skeletons Locked in Eternal Embrace.” There is an accompanying photo, too, in which “the youngsters’ skeletons lie face-to-face”, each with its arms around the other.

In Goose, the ninth story of this elegant collection, this small detail, rising to notice from Robert's inbox, prompts a series of recollections, associations, anxieties and, eventually, a short but extraordinary meditation on the past, the present and how each experience is anchored in a web of emotional memory. In Good Trouble, acclaimed novelist Joseph O'Neill's first collection of short stories, characters move in and out of this memory – they are both present and absent, controlled by their past choices but also somehow breaking free into a world of quiet epiphany. Across the 11 stories collected here, the author of Netherland continues with his New York setting (though his characters travel, both geographically and temporally), and writes with characteristic comedic poise and slow-building revelation.

The situations O’Neill invents are bizarre, even surreal at times, but each is shot through with a subtle psychology and human attention, each turning over the world of social convention, the unsaid that haunts relationships, finding some small moments of tenderness and holding them up to the light.

There are a few stories here where the conceit goes too far, where the absurdity of the situation (which is often the strength of the story) can seem plodding, or can tip over into something more unconvincing. In The Referees, for example, the protagonist is trying to find two character references so that he can join an apartment co-operative in New York. It is clear from his experience of seeking out letters of reference that he is running from the breakdown of a relationship – his ex-partner Samantha has asked him not to contact her, and her friend Courtney likewise refuses to be his referee – but the piety and formality with which his other acquaintances and friends refuse to help him seems forced and gets to be slightly grating even over the course of a story of just longer than 10 pages. A short vignette, Promises, Promises, in memory of David Foster Wallace, also appears out of place in the collection.

Variety

But the variety on offer here more than makes up for those blips. Good Trouble begins with a poet who has been asked to sign a petition (or "poetician") for the pardon of Edward Snowden; it recounts the tale of two retired teachers who host their yearly dinner for a former student, who regales and shocks them and their other guests by telling the story of his recent troubles with a sperm bank. Later in the collection, in The Mustache in 2010, the narrator muses on hipster facial hair but finds herself brought to tears. One of the most affecting and accomplished stories, The World of Cheese, follows Breda Morrisey, whose memory we flit in and out of, recalling a heartbreaking misconnection between mother and family, where an argument over the circumcision of her nephew opens up a complex mesh of personal insecurity and familiar tension.

At the end of the most remarkable story in the collection, Goose, the narrator pulls up a chair, away from the wedding he is attending, looking out over the Italian hills at night, and talks to a peculiarly sociable goose, but ends up thinking of his past, his memories: "He looks away from the goose but he finds he cannot look at anything without thinking that it's all goose, that he is already buried, everything is a burying ground out of which nothing can ever be unburied, he was born buried, the air is just a material of burial, the universe itself is buried, his child is buried in Martha and will come out buried."

In Good Trouble, what is left unsaid and unanalysed returns, is unburied, and both its comic and quietly tragic potential is set loose.