Year III
March 1 to March 31
Mary Morrissy
Dublin
One of my goals for Irish Short Story Month Year III (ISSM3) is to read and post on a number of new to me Irish short story writers. "Boom" is my first work by Mary Morrissy. I was motivated to read her when Nuala Ní Chonchúir in her interview for ISSM3 said she was one of her favorite contemporary short story writers. I was very glad to see one of Morrissy's stories was included in New Irish Short Stories by Joseph O'Connor.
"Boom" is a very interesting story about a family fragmented by a martial breakup. Like many other stories I have read for the month, it illustrates Declan Kiberd's contention that one of the most important and common themes of modern Irish literature is a working out of the consequences of a weak or missing father on his children.
Morrissy deals with a very difficult family issue for a young boy, witnessing and accepting that his mother has transferred her love from his father to another man, in this case one very unlike his father. The story take us from the very early years in the life of the boy up until he is in his late teens. His real father is a scrap metal dealer, his step father is a sound man who works in music studios. To a boy, the real father's work seems dirty and boring and his step father's somehow almost connected to the celebrity of the music business. These lines will let you see some of the beauty and the empathy of Morrissy's work:
We flash forward to the boy, Tim, as a young man. Totally against the wishes of his biological father, he has followed the footsteps of the other man to become a sound man for recording artists. We see Tim start a relationship with an air hostess, in Paris. Morrissy does a very good job of letting us see how Paris felt to Timothy.
Morrissy takes us back and forth in time in a masterful way,letting us see Tim's relationship to both men and allowing us to ponder how this shapes his life. It takes concentration to follow the plot action but at the end his parents are reunited. He is either married to or in a long term relationship with the air hostess Reggie who evidently is cheating on him just as his mother once did with on his father.
I greatly enjoyed this story. There is much more to it than I have mentioned but I do not want to spoil it for first time readers. I in fact read it three times.
Author Data
Mary Morrissy was born in Dublin in 1957. She has published one collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (London, Jonathan Cape/ New York, Scribner, 1993). Her novels are Mother of Pearl (Scribner, 1995/Jonathan Cape, 1996); and The Pretender (Jonathan Cape, 2000). She won a Hennessy Award for short fiction in 1984, a Lannan Literary Prize in 1995, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1996. For several years, Mary has taught creative writing for the University of Iowa creative writing summer programme, and has recently returned from a scholarship to New York, where she was researching her latest novel. She lives in Dublin.
I highly recommend Valerie Sirrs' very interesting interview with Morrissy
Mel u
"Boom" is a very interesting story about a family fragmented by a martial breakup. Like many other stories I have read for the month, it illustrates Declan Kiberd's contention that one of the most important and common themes of modern Irish literature is a working out of the consequences of a weak or missing father on his children.
Morrissy deals with a very difficult family issue for a young boy, witnessing and accepting that his mother has transferred her love from his father to another man, in this case one very unlike his father. The story take us from the very early years in the life of the boy up until he is in his late teens. His real father is a scrap metal dealer, his step father is a sound man who works in music studios. To a boy, the real father's work seems dirty and boring and his step father's somehow almost connected to the celebrity of the music business. These lines will let you see some of the beauty and the empathy of Morrissy's work:
"The first time the Man with the Quiet Voice comes to your house he brings a comic. You sprawl on the kitchen floor as the colours leap out at you in great muscled arms – Zap! – and fiery explosions. Boom! He and Mum sit at the kitchen table. There are a lot of silences between them just like when you and Mum are together, Mum doing the ironing, the smooth swaying motion of her hand, the small slap of the iron’s flex hitting against the legs of the board. It creaks when she puts her weight behind something tricky – the collars and cuffs of Dad’s shirts."
We flash forward to the boy, Tim, as a young man. Totally against the wishes of his biological father, he has followed the footsteps of the other man to become a sound man for recording artists. We see Tim start a relationship with an air hostess, in Paris. Morrissy does a very good job of letting us see how Paris felt to Timothy.
I greatly enjoyed this story. There is much more to it than I have mentioned but I do not want to spoil it for first time readers. I in fact read it three times.
Author Data
Mary Morrissy was born in Dublin in 1957. She has published one collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (London, Jonathan Cape/ New York, Scribner, 1993). Her novels are Mother of Pearl (Scribner, 1995/Jonathan Cape, 1996); and The Pretender (Jonathan Cape, 2000). She won a Hennessy Award for short fiction in 1984, a Lannan Literary Prize in 1995, and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 1996. For several years, Mary has taught creative writing for the University of Iowa creative writing summer programme, and has recently returned from a scholarship to New York, where she was researching her latest novel. She lives in Dublin.
I highly recommend Valerie Sirrs' very interesting interview with Morrissy
Mel u
1 comment:
Hi, Mel. Happy to know you've pursued ISSM3. I nearly missed it. I will be doing my post soon. I haven't read anything by Morrissy yet, but then again, I haven't really read a lot of short stories by Irish authors so I'm looking forward to discovering more of them.
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