Book review: Brilliance of a true wordsmith

Adrian Kenny’s collection of short stories can be described as an evolved exploration of the human condition

A real writers’ writer, Adrian Kenny delivers more dazzling descriptions in one story than some contemporaries can hope to conjure in a whole book.

• Mint & Other Stories 
• Adrian Kenny 
• The Lilliput Press, €16.95 

Noted memoirist, story writer, and Aosdána member Adrian Kenny’s third collection of short fiction displays at times the kind of sophisticated, unlaboured fluidity many artists romanticise.

On a sentence level, Kenny is nothing short of a magician — his lines satisfyingly skilful in the way of a true wordsmith. 

A real writers’ writer, he delivers more dazzling descriptions in one story than some contemporaries can hope to conjure in a whole book.

Ordinary feelings are cast in everyday moulds to create something quietly spectacular: “He felt a return of the old panic, as if he’d missed a step of a stairs in the dark.”

The titular tale sees the narrator reflect on a neighbour’s life through the herb she gifted him, now growing through his front railings; despite timely observations and elegant passages, it doesn’t quite earn the opening slot.

In the second story, Good Friday, Kenny settles into top form, concerned not just with observation but with multifaceted feeling. 

A married man on a fake fishing trip begins to catch a conscience, or perhaps the ick, watching a woman from his past frolic performatively on the beach and listen to “jazzed-up Irish ballads” during the secret hotel drinking-session where their planned affair looms.

Mature characters and their love lives

Throughout the book, Kenny portrays mature characters and their love lives with a deserved complexity and attentiveness — the majority of these stories thrum with an honesty that goes even deeper than the wry, revelatory short fiction we so often see revered these days, to hit on an evolved exploration of the human condition that brings to mind an Irish John Cheever.

Weekends in Deptford, in which the narrator visits a troubled friend whose high-rise window is free of glass, allowing her the option to jump out of it, contains the line: “You can’t sum up someone’s life in a few words.”

Maybe not, but Kenny has a remarkable ability to convey the essence of a character in a few strokes, to summarise a night with a mere sprinkling of syllables.

In Mister Pock — Finale, a zany tale in which a motley crew of neighbours are brought together by a feral cat:

“There was Anne, who had worked in the Bird’s Custard factory. They said she once threw an electric fire at the parish priest. She wore a Cancer Day daffodil in her hair.”

In A Fairy Tale, a man recalls escapades from his youth: “…that dark private party — ‘Bite me. I said bite.’”

Descriptions of all kinds of birds flit through the collection — when we find them tearing into prey it feels like the reflection of a brutal inevitability so deftly displayed in Kenny’s work, and when they appear in the final pages, we sense nothing about this writing is accidental.

The reader is treated to accounts of lifelong bonds; of temporary, hollow relief; of childhood experiences reverberating into old age.

Running through the collection is an understated, sleight-of-hand humour that feels as comforting as the familial warmth portrayed in its touching final offering, Two Cousins.

The stories have a rich yet uncomplicated quality, much like the duality of their recurring character, Marcus. 

The book is billed as interconnected, but this branding feels at times tenuous, an attempt to string together gems that are exquisite enough to be set alone. 

Marcus remarks that “an honest life could not be dull”, and, similarly, these traditional, introspective stories deserve to be studied and extolled.

Kenny is a writer with prose so elegant and observations so perspicacious that a new collection ought to be viewed as a major event very much worth the wait.

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