Word: brennans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...years now, Maeve Brennan's sharp-eyed alter ego, "the Long-Winded Lady," has been posting bulletins about the city and its inhabitants in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section. A self-styled "traveler in residence," she has always been able to turn quite ordinary things-two people looking in a store window, a small parade, a cat crouching under a parked van-into "moments of recognition." Her old-fashioned method is the unabashed use of straight description, as in A Snowy Night on West Forty-Ninth Street, the one New York story in Christmas...
...Maeve Brennan is one of those people who love New York "because the chances for being invisible are so much greater." Small and given to wearing dark glasses, she spends much of her time looking and listening, with only an open book for camouflage: "Nobody has ever noticed that I never turned the page." She keeps her observations in a large calendar book: "If you're writing about people in the street, you have to describe their clothes, all of them. Clothes tell...