THAT VERY PLACE

Guilt overwhelms innocence in McGuigan’s collection of short stories.

It seems downright perverse to find so much sublime beauty in these painstaking portraits of shattered lives, but it’s there, lurking within every line the author composes. Peggy is an elderly dementia patient quickly running out of time in “Because Her Hour Is Come.” Describing Peggy’s dreamed visits from her reproachful siblings, McGuigan writes, “Sometimes they appear in strong bodies, hair thick and dark and braided, shoes shined for a Sunday. Other nights they come in pain, skin loose and crepey on the arms, eyes filmy and defeated.” Each of the collection’s characters seems to be dealing with some sort of unassuageable regret that’s either slowly killing them or the people closest to them. (Most of the time, it’s both.) Seosaimhin, the teenage protagonist providing the staggering first-person narrative of “Everything Nice,” is unforgettable, exemplifying the human heart’s profound capacity for allowing fear and bravery to coexist. “The Last of the Darlin’ Boys” encapsulates generational trauma more effectively and lyrically than anything readers are likely to come across this year. Each entry is more gut-wrenchingly tragic than the last, but the subtle, power-packed prose couldn’t be more transcendent. While McGuigan clearly knows how to write, she demonstrates that she understands real life, too; with keen sensitivity, she fills in the emotional truths breathing inside the things left unsaid. After Maria tells Raoul she loves him in “Beloved,” the author exposes the cold, hard truth: “‘I know,’ he whispered, his tongue thick with sleep. ‘I know.’ She didn’t realize then what he meant, that love was a loose end he’d have to find a way to tie up.” McGuigan’s stories will haunt readers with the depths of their strange tragedy. There seems to be little in the human soul that escapes her eye.

A literary tour de force from beginning to end.