THE HAPPIEST DAYS

Connolly debuts with a collection of smooth, alluring, and satisfying stories that are very much at home in the traditional mode, perhaps appropriately for a daughter of a great English journalist, critic, and author, the late Cyril Connolly.

Longish, these nine tales let their author—and their characters—move at a natural, associative pace from one subject to another, as in the opener, “How I Lost My Vocation,” which effortlessly combines cancer, religious belief, and adultery in a Bristol family with never a false or forced note in its ten-year-old narrator’s voice. From time to time the apparent effortlessness flags slightly and “message” peeks through, as in a case of a strained marriage (“Canada”) or the more ambitious closing story (“Indian Summer”), again about adultery and a failed marriage (and an overweight boy), though even then Connolly’s observant eye and leisurely pace keep the mix rich and rewarding. What must be one of the most extraordinarily plotted short stories of all time is “Greengages,” about the life-long effect on a mother and daughter of the daughter’s infant kidnapping and what must be kept secret about it; “The Pleasure Gardens,” however, while equally readable, moves onto more familiar turf, father-daughter sexual abuse, though cunningly placing it in a frame about loneliness and adolescence. The narrative voice in “Paradise Drive,” rather artificially spoken (in part) by a car-stealing, lower-class English boy, rings less true than the best, as does “Bare,” about a woman who, in what she hopes to be a daring act in response to feeling lovelorn, gets a tattoo on her buttock. “The Bounce,” though, comes back full-strength, avoiding the least hint of either the familiar or the maudlin in a story about an Irish farmer, married, who falls in love with a lion-tamer in the WWII years—a story as full as many a novel could wish to be.

Composed, pleasant, stately, always interesting minor neo-classics of the genre.