Some 50 years ago, Edna O’Brien shook up preconceptions about the inner lives of Irish women with searing, lyrical fiction that spoke the truth about sexual yearning, moral repression, insidious abuse and symptoms of depression long shrugged off as chronic melancholy. Much has changed in Ireland since then, yet the sharply unapologetic stories in Louise Kennedy’s accomplished collection The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac tap into the same vein of quiet despair.
These 15 perceptive stories center largely on women confined by their circumstances, futilely grasping at elusive happiness. The very title of the opening story, which lends its name to the collection, sets the tone as a young woman, abandoned by her crooked husband, languishes like a prisoner in a newly built house that will soon be repossessed. Many of the situations that launch these stories are heartbreaking: A young mother internalizes feelings of anxiety and guilt over her developmentally challenged child (“Brittle Things”); a middle-aged woman watches her marriage wither after she and her husband agree to terminate a pregnancy (“Garland Sunday”).
Kennedy’s has a notable gift for infusing even fraught scenarios with a jaundiced Irish humor. The old friends who travel to Tunisia for an ill-conceived girls’ holiday in “Beyond Carthage” are savagely drawn bundles of human imperfection. In “Powder,” an awkward tentativeness is palpable between a young woman whose boyfriend has died and his grieving American mother as they drive through the west of Ireland scattering his ashes. One of the most penetrating stories, “In Silhouette,” harkens back to the troubles in Northern Ireland, as a ghost haunts the sister of the man who killed him. The troubles, of course, formed the backdrop of Kennedy’s well-received debut novel, Trespasses, which brought wide recognition to her as a writer in her 50s sharing her voice for the first time. The stories in The End of the World is a Cul de Sac reflect the formative experience of living through years of conflict, and confirm her place as a trenchant, keen observer of the violence and turmoil that live inside.
