IN AND OUT OF NEVER-NEVER LAND

by Maeve Brennan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1968

Fine short stories, all of which have appeared in the New Yorker. There are glimpses of an Irish childhood; also contemporary incidents involving a good-natured Labrador Retriever, cats ""wearing mixed furs"" and a horde of seven boisterous children--timeless in the grace of arrested joys. However, in two series of stories about two Dublin housewives, Mrs. Bagot and Mrs. Rose Derdon, Miss Brennan plots the way of the ""exile"" in the tidy world of lower-middle-class imperatives ("". . . an exile is a person who knows of a country that made all other countries seem strange""). The dying Bishop who made this discovery momentarily shared Mrs. Bagot's ""difference"" just as Rose's dead father had nourished hers. The difference, unspoken but realized, circumscribes a housewife's world. One husband accepts his banishment; the other mourns the loss of a self image never reflected. While Mrs. Bagot airs her rose-strewn carpet, ritually awaits the new sofa, blesses her garden with recognition, Rose brews tea, sanctifies newspaper items, soberly lays away a hyacinth offered by her husband--the secret exile in a life filled with portent is immaculately realized. One knows precisely the placement of Mrs. Bagot's and the contents of Rose's caches. While the author touches down here and there in the lives of the two women, the small domestic observations of day-to-day assume a spiritual content. A remarkable tracery of the inner country of quiet, gentle, outwardly inconsequential lives.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Scribners

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION