AN ARROW IN FLIGHT

Sixteen stories from a mid-20th-century master sadly fallen out of print, selected and introduced by Colm Toíbín.

American-born Irishwoman Lavin’s psychologically complex portraits were beloved by critics (the New York Times called her “magnificent”) and fellow writers, but since her death in 1996 her work has receded from view. This is in part because those stories aren’t heavily plotted or crowded with event (a criticism Lavin has great fun with here in “A Story With a Pattern”); in part because the work consists of minutely detailed, compelling portraits of ordinary people, often in provincial County Meath; and probably most of all (Joyce Carol Oates once remarked that the stories are set in “what I hope is the past”) because Lavin specializes in minute and intricate explorations of the interior lives of middle class, often isolated women. Several of the strongest entries center on widowhood, among these “In the Middle of the Fields,” “In a Café,” “The Cuckoo Spit,” and “The Long Ago,” which features a woman whose life is built around the “widowhood” she claims after her beau forsakes her for another woman and then dies young…a widowhood into which she settles for decades as she awaits—almost recruits—her friends to join her. Often the stories feature an intense, long-term cross-gender relationship in which one or both deny or downplay that intensity—unpersuasively to both themselves and the reader—by pointing to the absence of sex. Lavin is especially gifted at exploring missed and mangled connections between lonely people, and at showing the ways women in patriarchal midcentury Ireland mount subtle but stout resistance to the master plots of marriage and gender expectations. One highlight that combines several of these themes is “Happiness,” in which an aging mother and widow (attended for years by a cranky and devoted priest, and by her daughters) makes the insistent assertion of her happiness—effortful happiness—the center of her life, the redoubt that must be protected at all costs. Is she lying to herself, compensating? The story’s triumph is in the way, without ever sentimentalizing her, Lavin makes her protagonist not a delusional sufferer or a figure of fun but—provisionally, complexly, sadly—a kind of hero. Happiness is the hill she will die on. She chose it herself.

Subtle, poignant stories from a writer who deserves to be remembered—and read.