Search results for ""author jean mcgarry""

Jean McGarry has been praised for her "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise portraits" ( New York Times Book Review) and as "a writer who honors the human condition" ( Baltimore Sun). In her new collection of stories, Dream Date, she focuses her skills as a "gifted observer" ( Publishers Weekly) on the delicate boundary that separates the real from the ethereal states we drift into and out of as we try to make sense of our relationships, romantic and otherwise, with the other sex. Funny and haunting in equal measure-and suffused with a hint of the surreal-McGarry's stories explore the confusions, contradictions, and calamities of the modern relationship: in "Paris," a woman tracks down her wayward husband in the City of Lights and ends up having a meeting of minds with his mistress that gives great satisfaction to both women; in "Moon, June," a woman stalks the wardrobe of a wealthy socialite in a consignment shop, opening up a world of polymorphous delight and fashion envy; and in "The Secret of His Sleep," a man wakes up after forty years to a reality that is at once strangely familiar and completely unexpected. In these wry fictions, real-world problems often have solutions fashioned with the stunning clarity and logic of a dream.

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"Home" is the unnamed goal in this collection whose characters are somehow always searching for that ideal state of calm and warmth and perfect tolerance. Of course, that dream is quite unlike the hard world of Providence, where these dreamers really live - a world of wary neighbours and vague priests, of flinty teachers, of parents distant and irascible. Hungering for some better place, these sons and daughters of New England follow very different paths, and make very different - often shattering - discoveries. In "The Raft", a ten-year-old boy struggles with the shock of his father's leap from a ninth-floor window of the failed family business. A middle-aged woman invites her widowed mother to move in with her - and then the two of them must fight it out to see which one of them has made the greater "sacrifice". A high school senior, more interested in boys than in fruit flies, uses her genetics project - "Sex-Linked Traits" - to probe the foibles of her own high-strung family. In "Uncle Maggot", a little girl, unwilling to say goodbye at her father's coffin, shocks the mourners with a very odd performance. Charged with dark humour and dramatic power, the stories in "Home At Last" are crafted with that rare stylistic purity which readers have come to expect from an author whose work the "New York Times" has praised as "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise".

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A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry’s No Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had conjoined the lunacy of Cold Comfort Farm with the bitter grievances of Dubliners. As the author writes in “Strong Boy,” this might be “…because every family, rich or poor, is roughage.” The characters, gallant, goofy, gifted, and grim, include sickly mothers of a dozen children, boozy fathers with a gift of the gab, kids aspiring to be nuns and priests, or just to get out of town with a whole skin. A section is devoted to one marriage made in heaven: a Jewish psychoanalyst devoted to his ex-nun wife. Another set of stories reworks familiar fairy tales, setting them in the wild present. No Harm Done (whose title is Irish code for wishful thinking) concludes with a truce to the war between the sexes, and indeed a `solution’ to the tragicomedy that is marriage and family.

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The stories of Ocean State roll over the reader like a wave. Family pleasures, marriage, the essential moments and mysteries of a seemingly ordinary world that break into magical territory before we can brace ourselves-Jean McGarry puts us in life's rough seas with what the New York Times has called a "deft, comic, and devastatingly precise" hand.

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