For Richard Ford, who judged this year's Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, the 'Irishness' or otherwise of the stories was not a consideration – only their quality. Here he gives his overall impressions before assessing the six shortlisted stories, the winner of which will be announced later this month
I'VE ALWAYS resisted notions of national literature, and the suggestion that there's a distinctive Irish short story and voice, or a distinctive American one, or a Bulgarian one or a Somali one. Yes, okay, there maybe detectable differences. But literature's great opportunity is, in part, to make all these tongues speak a universal language that subordinates frail nation-state concerns in favour of more basic human ones which require champions.
I still rather doggedly believe that, and have taken that premise to the business of reading these Davy Byrnes stories this spring. I wasn't trying to find the most Irish storyin the bunch, but rather to find what seemed to be the most excellent one. Of course the 30 stories I read represented the cream of a fairly large crop of hundreds of entrants; and to submit a story one needed to demonstrate some elementary form of Irishness (what that could be I don't know and don't want to know – for reasons of indelicacy). But I must say that reading these 30 stories has left me with the unexpected impression that your regulation-grade Irish man or woman might just be able to write a pretty decent short story in his or her sleep.
It’s possible that there may be an “experimental movement” in current Irish story writing, but it wasn’t in evidence in these stories – which may have to do with the early winnowing-out process before I got my 30. The progress of the narratives wasn’t always lock-step chronological, and some were fragmented and minimal and elliptical; but they didn’t seem to want to subvert standard notions of time’s passage, either in the story or out in the world. The stories, indeed, seemed to accept that the world was out there being problematical, and that a story was a special place that mimicked the world by the use of language, but meant to direct us back to that world with a heightened awareness.
Likewise, characters in these stories made sense pretty much the way people do in the streets of Dublin (ie doggedly, colourfully, elliptically, profanely, sometimes eloquently). Thus the formal feature of human “character” itself wasn’t in dispute – except in moral-ethical, but not ontological ways.
Intimate life – between lovers, between friends, among families – was the recurrent subject matter. And houses in streets, the interiors of automobiles, bed (of course), the recognisable seaside, foreign countries whose names we know were mostly used as life’s plausible settings. Most of the stories seem to think that drama was to be found in unhappy circumstances – families that didn’t work, loves that didn’t flourish, age that wouldn’t stop for a breather, the approach of the grim reaper, him/herself. And most stories didn’t turn out altogether happily at their ends. I could’ve done with a few more laughs, to tell the truth. Maybe a few gay Irishmen. A few Irish of colour. If you’re writing about the actual world, well . . . they’re in there, too.
There wasn't a lotof the Irish being Irishin these stories (of course there was some, inescapably); and especially among the best of the stories a reader might not know – or if he did he didn't care – that Ireland was even the setting when it was. I was happy about this, although I can't quite say why.
Language was most often the shining beauty in these stories – as opposed to narrative structure, plottedness (of which there was precious little), or other fictive formalities. To my American ear, narrators and characters in these stories seemed to enjoy expressing themselves, seemed to like the feel of words in their virtual mouths, seemed to think that important life was largely lived in language – in what we say to each other, about each other, remember of each other, in how we love, detest, ignore, demean and relish.
In that way language was the window to the world, but also the pane that mediates and colours it, and on occasion it was the view itself. Here is where I found the most pleasure in these 30 stories, and it was the virtue that drew me exuberantly back to reading each day. For writers – who inevitably sees the world, as Pritchett said, from across a frontier – words are our medium, our transit, and our precious subject. These stories all seemed generously to share that conviction, and to want to make the most – not the least – of its possibilities.
FORD’S FINDINGS
Citations on the six shortlisted stories
(alphabetical by writer)
Fosterby Claire Keegan
A child’s rapt and eloquent vision of life-in-tumult between two families. In lifting a homely rural life to our moral notice, the story exhibits a patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality, and does so through a lavish, discriminating appetite for language and its profound capacity to return us to life renewed.
Living in Unknownby Mary Leland
An elegant and harrowing story of aging and reconciliation and compassion, and of the edgy separation of one’s self from the moorings of past, parents and youth. This story is intense with experience and with language that’s vividly apt. The reader’s own experience is of an anguish that somehow consoles and preserves.
This Isn’t Heavenby Molly McCloskey
A subtle and perceptive story, set in contemporary Africa, that deftly and affectingly compresses and focuses time and geography. Its signal success is one that it shares with many excellent stories: to locate drama to the side of where we might expect to find it and then to make its subject seem essential. Here, a man loves a woman, but never manages to experience love at all.
The Road Wifeby Eoin McNamee
An irresistible story of modern Europe – long-haul truckers, Russian prostitutes, storms at sea, flood-lit embarcaderos past midnight, pale longing – and death. The language here, the authority, the stark atmospherics are incomparable and by themselves are worth this story’s brief, hectic, melancholy journey.
Storm Glassby Kathleen Murray
A stylish, remarkably confident story that makes a pretty virtue out of the flecks of stark memory and language with which we construct a cohesive past and a saving view of ourselves within it. Narratively, it is a rich and moving variation upon an image – storm – the radiant consequences of which last on far beyond its appointed day.
The Rescueby Susan Stairs
A nervy, tightly compressed, and alarmingly brief story of human extremis: children hurtling to the ends of the too-short tethers connecting them to modern existence. Graceful and knowing in its stripped-out and plumbed bleakness, it is a love story – of a kind – but a kind in which love scarcely avails.