Wild Decembers

Dear Chris,

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I've been wondering since I wrote you last--and even more so since I've read your respone today--if what's bothering me about Wild Decembers has less to do with Edna O'Brien in particular than with a certain weariness I feel about Irish fiction in general. (Irish literature seems to be immune to the reader satiety that threatens other ethnic fiction, especially Jewish.) I felt a similar restlessness when I reviewed Rodney Doyle's A Star Called Henry this past fall, with its attempt to embrace a broader historical canvas. I'm not sure I'm endlessly curious to read about the "discarded world" of Irish history--or about the mixture of nostalgia and bitterness that it invokes in writers like Doyle and O'Brien. In addition, I find O'Brien more uniquely herself when she sticks to the domestic/romantic side of things: Those parts of the novel strike me as strongest. The fable-like undertones of this story, which you pointed out by describing "its ... cast of physical and emotional cripples" with "primeval longings," seem too generic and imposed to me. Or maybe I simply am drawn more to the smaller canvas. Speaking of the pleasures of the smaller canvas, I find myself suddenly wondering, out of the blue, whatever happened to the New Yorker writer Elizabeth Cullinan? She published a brilliant collection of stories, Yellow Roses, about 20 years ago, shot through with what I call Irish fatalism and you call too narrow, indeed tautological, a definition ("like calling Beckett an existentialist"). If I remember correctly, several of them focused on a doomed affair--the best kind, at least for literary purposes--between a shy young woman and a man named Charlie. She writes a bit like O'Brien without the curlicues; there's the same romantic despair and the same lyricism, but it's kept on a tight leash.

As far as your praise for her technique here being "a brave departure:" I would emend that to brave and reckless. Did you really think the shifts into first person, when we were suddenly inside Breege's head, worked? I thought they were too sporadic, and since the naive and unbookish Breege uses the same sort of metaphoric description--"a mass of bodies cleaved together like frogspawn"--and end-stopped, serpentine phrasing that O'Brien does, I figured we were just hearing more of O'Brien on Breege rather than Breege on Breege. And what about the bits and pieces of spare characters--such as the two sisters, Reena and Rita, who run a seduce-and-destroy scam, where Reena is the "nymphet" and Rita is "the brains." I suppose they're meant to provide some comic relief, but they seem too much like a circus act to be truly funny. As for "the Crock," with his hapless leching and sinister plans, he seemed like a bad imitation of all the wandering, all-seeing Fools in Shakespeare, and plain irritated me.

Having said all this, let me also add that the novel did exert a powerful narrative pull on me. I read on, eager to see how things would turn out for Joseph, Bugler, and Breege. One can't argue with O'Brien's gifts, or the way she sweeps the reader along. And there are many patches of the book where the writing isn't overripe but, rather, supremely evocative: "He smooths and resmooths her hair, sparks of electricity shoot out of it, zoom out of it, and her face, always pale, is blanched and votive in the moonlight. She is like one of the stone figures except for her eyes, which are mad and shiny." But one expects such writing from O'Brien--it is, in fact, what one reads her for.

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This week, a discussion of Edna O'Brien's Wild Decembers (click here to buy it). Chris Kelly is an Irish writer who lectures on English and Irish studies at New York University. Daphne Merkin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes "Reckonings," a column on personal and cultural life. She is the author of Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays (click here to buy it).

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