REAL TALENT, IN SHORT
Newcomer Andrew Fox dazzles with a superb collection
For decades the short story was glibly described as Ireland’s national art form, but it has always been a form that editors in publishing houses greatly admired and their accountants greatly shied away from. The generation of O’Connor, Lavin and O’Flaherty may have been acclaimed, but within Ireland even their work initially often only saw the light of day in publications such as The Bell, which – during the war – was printed on paper that had been re-pulped so often the print was barely legible.
Even throughout the recent boom in Irish novel writing the short story has refused to go away. It has been remarkable – and remarkably heartening – to see it come back into fashion, with a superb new generation of authors such as Kevin Barry, Colin Barrett and Sara Baume. And it is great to see a major imprint like Penguin throw its weight behind a remarkable new talent in Andrew Fox. Fox’s debut collection, Over Our Heads, shows that he is more than capable of holding his own in the ranks of the dynamic new Irish exponents of the short story.
A story collection by its nature lacks the central narrative of a novel, but Fox’s book deftly operates as a coherent unit. It reads like an emotional blueprint of the lives of an Irish generation now entering their thirties, who are trapped in the pincer jaws of negative equity in hastily completed apartment blocks at home, or who have not so much emigrated as commuted to new lives in US cities. But those American streetscapes are so imbued in their imaginations from early on, as an alternative default setting, that they seem equally in exile and equally at home, whether muddling through lives in Dublin or New York.
Their lives rarely possess master plans and there is a refreshing lack of pyrotechnics on display in Fox’s writing. Here is a writer alert to what Anthony Cronin once defined as a central – though overlooked – driving force within people’s lives: the simple element of drift.
Fox is not imprisoned by the boilerplate notion of stories building to moments of epiphany and revelation. His characters’ lives are craftily haphazard: people meet accidentally, fall in and out of love by accident, drift into marriages and even – in his tour-de-force closing story, Are you Still There?– are irrevocably drawn into taking on parenthood despite his narrator knowing that the child is not biologically his.
The book is arranged carefully. It ends in that moment of acceptance of de facto parenthood in a New York hospital, but it starts with stories skilfully evoking a small Dublin seaside town. In Manhood a teenage loses his virginity at a party, by accident on his part and by design of the girl from whom he least expected such an initiation. In Everything another of Fox’s prototype (and often nameless) narrators sees his future starkly mapped and declines to run from his fate.
Whether set in Ireland or in the New York, Fox’s characters reveal themselves in short, often seemingly trivial cameos. He is able to tread so lightly that we only realise we have been cleverly punched in the solar plexus after we finish the last line.