The young Irish writer Andrew Fox (born Dublin 1985) now resides in New York and his first, 213-page collection crackles with tales from both sides of the ocean, wandering pretty much at ease through the social strata in the case of his native Ireland.
Pennies, the opening story, is a particularly moving exercise, set in a baleful Dublin scraggy outland or wasteland, as two mates put coins on railway tracks, coins which duly shine after the impact of the passing train-wheels. One of them has occasional bruises on his face, pointing to a violent home, and the story works its way deftly towards a particularly inspired coda. The second story, Manhood, is all alco-pops and cans and hitting on girls and aggro. The dialogue and setting seem to be the genuine article - one of the characters “nuts” another on the bridge of his nose, while another “legs it out to the jacks.”
For something completly different, the writer can himself `leg it out' to County Meath, as in the story Everything. He deftly conjures a convincing rural setting, veined through with equally sharp dialogue, as a young fiancé approaches marriage to Melissa, who comes from a prosperous farming family. Melissa’s plans for the wedding are frustrated by the overbearing mother Siobhán, and her annoyance is transferred – as is the way of these things – on to her hapless young beau. The story is ostensibly no more than a cameo of pre-nuptial family tension, but with great economy, the author manages to convey the sense of at least a novella’s narrative breadth or scope in his 11-page short story.
The couple’s Saturday visit to the homestead - they are out from Dublin, where else - in the middle of a fierce rain storm is described with exquisite subtlety and a true poetic sense. “A bank of swollen cloud loomed over the puddled driveway, “ begins one such description. “The wind had stilled and the countryside was eager and delirious.”
In the story Are You Still There?, the setting is New York as a young Dublin man brings his American girl-friend to Ireland for the first time. The visit somehow poisons the relationship and the young woman's experience of the country disillusions the young woman. Moreover, her malaise is linked with his casually-expressed plans for the couple to return to Ireland to live sometime in the future. There is an absolute killer twist in the tale, but I won’t spoil.
Occupations concerns three small-time criminals whose community service is spent chemically scrubbing away elaborate murals that have been done by stealth by unknown artists in Dublin city-centre offices. The men’s supervisor used to run an Irish bar in Mallorca, now he drinks to excess and drives the boys to their workplace in a van - four shiftless lives on their way to somewhere else. Somehow the story doesn't take fire, in your reviewer’s humble opinion, much as one wants it to.
In The Parcel, a mysterious package hovers at the centre of Dublin suburban newness as three neighbours begin to get to know each other after a dog goes missing. The story swells beautifully with possibility and a tenuous sense of how things might go afterwards. All in all, a very fine debut in most of these fifteen stories.
Paddy Kehoe
