Tales from the Irish Club: A Collection of Short Stories

by Lester Goran

Tales from the Irish Club contains 11 wry accounts of an enclave of Irish Americans in Pittsburgh during and after World War II.  In this first collection of short stories by Lester Goran are the often comic, sometimes tragic tales of Jack Lanahan, the transcendental artist who carves nothing but wooden roosters; Long Conall O’Brien, haunted by the ghosts of prostitutes he has known world-wide; Mrs. Pauline Conlon, famous as the woman who outlives three husbands―until she meets Sailor Kiernan; and the night an image of the Madonna appears on the wall of Local No. 9 of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Ranging from the grimly realistic to the fantastic, Goran’s stories examine lives so unheralded that only the Irish Club, Forbes Field―where the Pirates break their hearts, and St. Agnes Church―where they attend school and prepare for eternity―know their joys and sorrows. “Tales from the Irish Club presents a group of stories so well imagined that one can hardly tell them apart from life…They are meant to overheard, not heard, as if the reader were a child at a wedding eavesdropping on someone’s loquacious, slightly drunken aunt…I abandoned the Hibernian world of Lester Goran’s Pittsburgh with a sense of loss. Closing his book felt like driving away from my own boyhood city after a large Thanksgiving dinner, with improbable stories still echoing in my head. Tales from the Irish Club is a memorable work.” ― New York Times Book Review

Genres: Fiction

Paperback

First published May 1, 1996

Reviews

[Daniel Clausen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has a clear sense of time, place, identity. It exists in the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Local No. 9, better known as the Irish Club, in the paroxysms of delight as speakers swap stories, intimate as kisses between lovers. All the stories revolve around people who came through its doors. At its heart is the melancholy and the whimsical. Every story seems to start with a kind of unspoken vernacular..."Let me tell a story about this guy I once knew..." There is also a sense that the people of these tales are somehow forgotten. There is a sense that these stories would be told forever as long as the Irish Club still existed. But then, inexplicably, it stopped existing. Such is the passage of time that things long thought immutable are swept away by the great tide of history.

This is Lester at his grandest. At a punchy 130 odd pages, there seems no misplaced word, not an extra syllable. Every page seems more necessary somehow...perhaps punctuated by the stories that were surely left out. There is a humble simplicity that makes the book feel as if telling a story about locals is somehow epic. Is that possible, could it be true that epic story-telling can exist at the level of the local?

Of course, it's true. All good story-telling is local storytelling. It doesn't matter if you've never had the peanuts at Forbes Field or that you've never seen with your own eyes a great boxer slowly descend into a drunk stumblebum, never had hallucinations about prostitutes a few years into marriage...all these things come through somehow in melancholy clarity because every detail seems to ring right and true.

After all, good writing is like love. It can run like a poison through your bloodstream, destroying everything before it and leaving you wanting more.

And there is the lesson for all young writers: let your writing be a world unto itself, every detail a link to a larger world, no matter how small the size of your story or slender the size of your volume. Make every world feel part of something bigger like the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Local No. 9. Do this, and your stories will live on.

For older writers, what wisdom does Lester hold for you? Perhaps this: "The race was it; and that was over. Age brought not wisdom: or...it visited on a simple saloon-keeper the wrong truths" (p. 104). The race is everything. Run till there is nothing left and ask nothing more of writing and the world.

[Gconnolly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another blast from the past book, but a charmer nonetheless. This is a sweet collection of short stories telling all about the history of the Hibernian clubs in Pittsburgh with lots of reflections on Forbes Field and Oakland by when. Guess I am just a sucker for memorabilia, but I really enjoyed this selection.