Kirkus Reviews QR Code
NO HARM DONE by Jean McGarry Kirkus Star

NO HARM DONE

by Jean McGarry

Pub Date: April 21st, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-94315-007-6
Publisher: Dalkey Archive

Short stories dominated by postwar Irish-American families and marked by an entertainingly strange sensibility.

In her ninth book, McGarry (Ocean State, 2010, etc.) veers from conventional to consciously weird. And even her conventional is often a bit out there. Several households feature Irish-American Catholics in the 1950s-'60s with at least one would-be nun or priest. There’s usually too much booze and anger and too little money. Children often bear the brunt of the overall title’s irony. In “Tower of Ivory, House of Gold,” a teen nun wannabe panics when her fervor wanes and mortifies her flesh with coarse twine and sandpaper. One story is narrated by a boy who sounds like a noir hoodlum and gets in trouble while trying on priestly vestments in a Catholic supplies store (“And the Little One Said”). In “Sleeping Beauty," a girl constantly spits out pieces of fur, like a human cat, angering her mother, who sends her to school on her birthday wearing an enema bag as a necklace. The less-oblique fairy-tale retelling of “Rella” has Cinderella find a bracelet in a doughnut. Two couples, both childless, enjoy some normalcy. One appears in a hodge-podge of a tale that traces the back story of a lesbian couple (“The System”). The other appears in a long story titled “Someone Is There.” A psychiatrist falls in love with his first inpatient, a woman mired in depression when her religious vocation vanishes; her three brothers are priests. When his sessions are over for the day, the shrink finds “his own ego [is] replenished” by driving in his antique Mercedes Benz, named Hildegard.

McGarry at her best pushes the envelope just past realism in a way that can be comic, creepy, and poignant, putting her in the school of Lorrie Moore and George Saunders.