TWO SUMMERS IN IRELAND

O’Leary offers two intimate novellas set in Ireland, separated by half a century.

The first novella, “An Unspoken Peace,” focuses on Conor Fenney, a young Irish American man from Chicago who yearns to connect with his ancestors’ past. In 1969, Conor attends summer school at Trinity College, where he meets his rakish, well-to-do roommate, Aidan. What results is a chronicle of concealed queer desire and grief that blurs the contours of male companionship, interspersed with detailed gestures toward Irish histories and landscapes. Fifty years later, in 2019, an unnamed, aging man in “The Galway Girl” returns to Ireland to visit the Cliffs of Moher following the death of his wife of 45 years. There he meets Brooke, a 33-year-old American woman training to be a counselor for “young people with addiction issues.” The two form an unlikely, quiet connection bounded by their limited time together as they travel through Galway for a single day. These are simple, straightforward stories that present tender moments of human connection. However, the prose is often monotonous and unvaried; the narration lacks nuance, turning something as simple as “warm stew...weak on the meat, but strong on potatoes” into Conor’s unchallenged speculation that “the cook was trying to make up for all the years the potatoes failed the Irish.” Most interestingly, the collection immediately establishes a tenuous connection between the two novellas, the first noting from its very beginning that Conor was 17 when he first visited Ireland and still reminisces about his encounter 50 years later. Meanwhile, the aging male character in “The Galway Girl” remarks that he “went to Trinity College in Dublin for a summer session right out of high school,” just as Conor does in “An Unspoken Peace.” Although there’s little elaboration upon the connections between Conor and his ostensible older self, it is perhaps this blank space between the two novellas that rings most painfully true to life—much goes unspoken, and much comes undone.

Tender, if sometimes-trite, tales of Ireland adventures.