COME BACK IRISH

by Wendy Mai Rawlings

Nine inhabitants of a sleepy Irish seaside town tell what they know about a visitor from out of town who is rumored to be both attractive and dangerous. A young mother in an affluent Long Island community finds herself strangely drawn to the woman she has hired as her housekeeper. After her small business venture fails, a woman is forced to move back in with her parents and discovers they aren't the couple she thought they were at all. In fourteen expertly crafted stories, Wendy Rawlings chronicles with comic sympathy what happens when American women and Irish men, parents and children, employers and employees, hurtle toward each other and crash headlong into cultural or generational roadblocks. Like the American in the title story, who can imagine only a "litter of claddagh rings and Erin go bragh, the high-stepping of Riverdance on videocassette" until she gets on a plane and goes to Ireland, Rawlings's fiction entreats us to toss out the picture-perfect images we have of American consumer culture, Irish tourist towns, and the institution of marriage and enter the world of her fictions—more contradictory, troubling, and true.

Genres: Short Stories

192 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

Reviews

[Joseph Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simply put: reading The Agnostics first really ruined this for me. The narrative of each story still packs a punch, but stylistically it doesn't compare. I'm not suggesting this isn't a good collection of stories, but after reading Rawlings's novel, my expectations were in a different place.

Still, though, Rawlings has a knack for writing stories that unfold exactly how you expect, and yet the endings still feel wholly unexpected.