Edna O'Brien's 'Love Object': Brilliant mind in an interesting world

The Love Object

Selected Stories

By Edna O'Brien

Little, Brown. 529 pp. nolead ends

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Reviewed by Jane Smiley

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Edna O'Brien's new book, The Love Object: Selected Stories, includes stories from the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, and the early 2000s. The collection is honest, daring, thoughtful, eloquent, restless. O'Brien is, apparently, an extrovert - many of her stories are set at parties, and so they let us peer through the keyhole at how the privileged comport themselves. Her female protagonists are usually not married, and often finished with or about to begin illicit affairs with married men.

That relatively unexplored territory is another of O'Brien's contributions. She habitually parses ambiguous feelings. In "Paradise," a young woman is taken by her lover to an island where four boats she can see from the house are owned by her lover's wealthy friends. It is clear from the beginning that the protagonist's path to the traditional Pride and Prejudice sort of happy ending is neither straight nor clear, even to herself. It is not only that she doesn't fit in, but more that her own feelings are too complex: "She had no name for it, that puzzling emotion that was more than love, or perhaps less, that was not simply sexual, though sex was vital to it and held it together like wires supporting a broken bowl." As she works her feelings out, they get stranger and stranger, until she brings herself to commit an act that is not at all paradisiacal, yet strangely appropriate.

In the title story, "The Love Object," from the 1960s, O'Brien brilliantly follows out the whole arc of an affair, from adoration and intimacy through grief and despair to sanity and a form of reconciliation. It is the young woman who is passionate, the young woman who can't get enough, the young woman who must sort out her feelings and learn. George Eliot was never like this.

Many of O'Brien's stories are set in Ireland. The early ones draw upon her youth in County Clare; later ones address political questions in a personal way. One of these I particularly like is "A Scandalous Woman," in which two young girls from the same village bond around their common urge to test all sorts of limits (and the limits are sharp - the narrator recalls of Eily that "there was a story that when young, she always lived under the table to escape her father's thrashings").

The narrator is so fascinated with Eily and her friend Nuala that she allows them to play an elaborate and sadistic game of doctor in which they force her to drink turpentine and then pretend to operate on her. Eily discovers desire, and enlists the narrator in her clandestine affair with a new man in town.

Another terrific one, "Shovel Kings," takes place in London. The narrator, now old and famous, befriends a man of about her own age named Rafferty, and he recalls for her his 1960s London experience, when teenage boys were brought over from Ireland and put to work (hard work, what we might call today forced labor) digging trenches for the installation of electric cables. Rafferty doesn't regret his life, a melange of hardship and bad choices spiced here and there with pleasure, but O'Brien skillfully invites the reader to form her own opinions about the English treatment of the Irish.

Edna O'Brien is 84 now, 7 months older than Alice Munro, 71/2 years older than Joyce Carol Oates. For me, the great literary privilege of our times has been to follow these women writers into what you might call their retrospective years. After decades of history, husbands, lovers, children, grandchildren, and lengthy careers, they give us insights not available to earlier women writers who died young, or were childless, or who had to keep their sexuality to themselves.

Several stories in The Love Object are poignant reminders of what can be learned. In "My Two Mothers," the narrator reflects on the breach between herself and her mother, who started out profoundly close but broke apart over the openness of the narrator's writings and the upheaval of the narrator's marriage (both of which the mother never supported). Cruelties abound on both sides, reconciled and finally understood, but too late.

The Love Object was bound to be brilliant - these stories are for the most part known and loved. But reading them all together engages us in a lengthy, thoughtful dialogue between a brilliant mind and an interesting world. Not to be missed.