May 20, 2024
Frustrations large and small beset the Northern Irish characters in Carlson’s dry-witted and appealing fifth collection (after The Raptures). In “A Certain Degree of Ownership,” an unnamed woman encounters a family with a baby on the rarely used public beach she’s come to consider her own. When the baby begins to crawl, unnoticed, into the sea, the narrator thinks, “I do not want the baby to crawl into the sea. But I do not think it is my job to stop the baby crawling into the sea.” “Fair Play” centers on a Londoner staying on his wife’s family’s land in Ulster during the Covid-19 pandemic. He takes his two sons to Bouncy Bob’s, the Belfast equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese, and panics when they disappear in a tube slide and the attendants show no concern (“This place is hungrier than other places,” he thinks. “It will never let go of its own”). Other entries probe the region’s folk magic practices, as in “Tinged,” where a friend of the narrator’s family casts a spell to heal their ailing cow. Some stories end before making the most of their provocative premises, but for the most part Carson holds the reader’s attention with her singular observations and turns of phrase. This is worth a look.
Starred review from June 1, 2024
In Carson's fifth collection of short stories, Northern Ireland is a place that protects and punishes in equal turn. The unnamed protagonist of the title story has finally convinced his Spanish girlfriend, with whom he has a tense, confusing relationship, to visit his native Belfast. She has no interest in meeting his family or seeing the places he frequented growing up or even appeasing him. Carson has set this story in an alternate present in which animals seen as obsolete are culled or sent away; what Paola wants to see is the last horse in Britain. The narrator's daydreams of how lovely it will be to share his hometown with his partner are quickly squashed after they arrive, but he still at one point feels "the gut-twist relief of belonging somewhere specific." This feeling--at once soothing and nauseating--is present in each of these 16 stories as their characters confront upsetting or deeply frightening obstacles, some absurd, some starkly mundane. In "Grand So," a couple struggles to keep their jam business afloat. Granda buys a used car for Granny and their granddaughter Ruth to drive around the province, handing out samples, even though "nobody wants to buy luxury jam. This is Northern Ireland. In the eighties. People have other things on their minds." Ruth discovers that the ghost of the car's previous owner--a large chain-smoking man she dubs the Backseat Man--is haunting it. Worse, her family is Protestant, and this man is clearly "the other sort of ghost." "Caravan," another standout, is told from the point of view of a young girl. Caroline is 10, "almost a grown-up," and tired of kiddie stuff. Her father promises that if she can fix up the old caravan she and her sister play house in every summer, she can have it as her very own grown-up room. This story's strengths are in its subtleties, especially its framing of the ways in which the vibrancy of girlhood can lurch, all of a sudden, into the bleak logic of adulthood. An admirable collection of stories, saturated with acerbic wit and startling empathy.
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Starred review from June 1, 2024
Northern Irish writer Carson (The Raptures, 2022) returns with a collection of 16 darkly comic short stories that move fluidly between decades and genres, from the alternate universe of ""Pillar,"" in which ""bespoke life guides"" are available for purchase by those struggling with mental health crises, to the horror-tinged ""One-Hander,"" in which a severed hand keeps appearing in a woman's refrigerator. Some of Carson's characters have left their homeland for ""the Mainland,"" but whether they hate it, like the reluctant returnee in ""Fair Play"" who blames ""shitty Belfast"" for the disappearance of his young sons, or are nostalgic for it, like the narrator of the title story who finally convinces his Spanish girlfriend to return with him to see the last living horse in Britain, none of them can escape the pull of its history. While only a few stories directly reference the Troubles, their legacy manifests in unexpected ways: a ghost haunting the backseat of a used car, or an abandoned baby adrift on a river in a biscuit tin. Carson's blend of dark humor and unwavering compassion for her characters will appeal to fans of Louise Kennedy (The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac, 2023) and Rebecca Miller (Total, 2022).
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