Word: brennan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...MAEVE BRENNAN...
...Maeve Brennan is the kind of writer who can transform the arrival of a sofa in a lower-middle-class Dublin household or the cleaning of a carpet (one with big pink roses on it) into an extraordinary celebration of family love. She does this by a steady accumulation of detail and alternate flashes of passionate statement and raw insight. The accomplishment is formidable-something few writers attempt without sounding precious, dull, or both...
...gift is flawlessly demonstrated in the title story from Christmas Eve, Maeve Brennan's first book in five years. Tis the night before Christmas, in a cramped suburban house in Dublin. The husband, Martin, stands downstairs in the hall, listening to his wife Delia putting their two small girls to bed. Between husband and wife are the stairs and the dark length of the hall, containing a coatrack, an umbrella stand and a chair. "Nobody ever sat on the chair and nobody ever stood long in the hall," Brennan writes. "It was a passageway-not to fame...
Love that is largely unexpressed, and the fear of losing it, dominates the lives of most Brennan characters. All of them, whether they survive in shabby Dublin gentility, bask in fashionable East Hampton, or simply hang on by their fingernails in New York City, live in a world of secret thoughts and elaborate private rituals that they cannot share. Brennan has always specialized in the involuntary victims of such isolation-children and animals. She has even written successfully about a large Labrador retriever named Bluebell...
...world where the worst that can happen is to lose your Irish maid or private view of the Hudson. Plots turn on such matters as who will get nightly custody of an antique stone hot-water bottle. Though she deals ironically with such elegantly dated doings, Brennan never substitutes malice for wit-not even when skewering a truly obnoxious theater critic who is not above stealing his neighbor's copy of the Times...