Neglect

Were arriving aliens to be introduced to the concept of the USA via the work of Willy Vlautin, they would find a country populated by quiet people enduring quiet struggles. Family dysfunction, the repetitiveness of minimum-wage work, crushing loneliness and the detailed grind of daily existence (rarely has a writer said so much through groceries bought and meals cooked) are dominant themes, though always backlit by the suggestion that goodness prevails. Even entertaining the idea of the American Dream is an indulgence when the reality of simple survival is far more urgent. In this sense Vlautin is the son of John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver.

Colm Toibin is a master of understatement, his work characterised by great emotional intelligence coupled with redoubtable restraint. This is his third anthology of stories, following Mothers and Sons (2006) and The Empty Family (2010). He fills the gaps between words – what he doesn’t say – with as much meaning as the prose. Familiar themes emerge. There is the Irish diaspora in the US (as in Brooklyn and Long Island); the Catalan Pyrenees (the setting for ‘The Long Winter’ in Mothers and Sons); and Argentina (as in the novel The Story of the Night). Feelings of exile and being an outsider are aroused, while Catholicism still taps on the shoulders of those long lapsed.

In her disillusioned later years Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, bitterly reflected: ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’ In Hardy Women, Paula Byrne sets out to recover the stories of the women in his life ‘who did not have a voice and who were often deliberately omitted from Hardy’s self-ghosted autobiography’, in order to reveal that ‘the magnificent fictional women he invented would not have been possible without the hardship and hardiness of the real ones who shaped his passions and his imagination’.