Okay.
These are the big guns.
Seven hundred and fifty-one pages of Frank O’Connor.
And loving every minute of it.
So I love Frank O’Connor. He wrote my favourite short story that I read in my teens (My Oedipus Complex) and my favourite short story I read in my twenties (Guests of the Nation) (fun and embarrassing meghan-fact: I did not realize it was the same Frank O’Connor who wrote both these stories until I was, maybe, 26). On more than one occasion, I’ve lamented that they don’t teach Frank O’Connor much in school (maybe they do in Ireland, but not here in Canada). Instead, I had five years of our short-story English component being The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber and All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury (they couldn’t even find the same two Canadian short stories for us to read from grades seven through eleven).
So I love Frank O’Connor. I know that the previous paragraph also started that sentence, but I do. He has stories that don’t have a plot and they work. He has stories that are heavy with back story that’s never revealed and they work. He has stories with the artifice of a narrator telling a story about someone telling a story and they work. He has a story about a lion tamer, in Ireland, in this collection and it works. You can read Frank O’Connor and see that you can strip so much away and still have something amazing. You can also read Frank O’Connor and see a story that, if I were to write it, would collapse under all the strain, the history, the religion, the family, the expectations, but his stories don’t. They soar. They are funny, in a desperate, despairing way. They are sad in a way that makes one smile. I think it bears repeating: so I love Frank O’Connor. I mean, how can you not love someone who:
was always a great believer in buttered toast.
This sounds harsh, but I think it’s true: If you are a short fiction writer and you knowingly haven’t read Frank O’Connor, then there may be something wrong with you.
Still, loving Frank O’Connor is not without its difficulties. He’s a product of a time and locale. He uses the word Jew as a pejorative and Oriental as a description. Both those, at least in this collection, aren’t frequent. What is frequent is that women are generally secondary, and there are times when the comments on or depictions of women just skirt the line of misogyny. I’d like to think O’Connor is just being accurate regarding the treatment of women in such a staunch Catholic setting, but reading O’Connor, I’ve never really been able to shake the feeling that he can’t imagine how frustrating it would have been for so many of these women, treated like second-class citizens and expected to be baby machines, like his imagination just cannot imagine something like that.
As for this collection, it’s a bit baffling if one is looking for background. I have another collection of Frank O’Connor stories (Vintage’s Stories by Frank O’Connor) where Frank O’Connor himself tells you why he chose the stories he did. But in this collection, there is no introduction or essay at the end saying why these stories were picked. It’s called Collected Works, but not every Frank O’Connor story is there, and the publisher is actually pedaling three other Frank O’Connor collections as well. Is there overlap between these collections? Are there links between them? In the collection I read, characters tend to reappear, certain priests, certain families; are all occurrences of, say Father Ring, in the collection I just read, or does he appear in other collections as well? Other than reading the other collections, I have no idea. I find it odd (I’d like to say disrespectful, this is Frank O’Connor we’re talking about here! Does the publisher not know that I love him?) that they couldn’t find anyone willing to write an intro to Frank O’Connor, to say why these stories were chosen, and maybe why others were left out. That’s pretty much the only negative I have to say about this collection, and, of course, it has nothing to do with Frank O’Connor himself.
Again, I love Frank O’Connor. I read him and I feel closer to some of my family, who were a big Irish Catholic brood. Most immigrated to Canada generations ago, but there are still echoes of their behaviour in these stories. And maybe that’s why I love Frank O’Connor when on paper (ha! writing pun!) one wouldn’t think so; I’ve complained about male-view stories enough that perhaps my love of Frank O’Connor seems a bit mystifying. But you can’t deny good writing. You can’t deny that Frank O’Connor loves all his characters, even the despicable ones like Jeremiah Donovan. Each character is like a universe to him-(or her, rarely)-self. Just like people. Just like life.
Collected Stories by Frank O’Connor went on sale August 12, 2014, but the I think it may be a reissue of a collection from 1981, and the stories within have publication dates spanning from 1931 to 1965.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I also apologize to Tesfa and Geoff who are going to have to listen to me saying begor and wisha for the next few weeks until I get it out of my system.