The Love Object: Selected Stories

by Edna O'Brien, John Banville (Introduction)

Overview

Collected here for the first time are stories spanning five decades of writing by the "short story master" (Harold Bloom).

As John Banville writes in his introduction to The Love Object, Edna O'Brien "is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time." The thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without.

Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked and some carry O'Brien's distinct sense of the comical. In "A Rose in the Heart of New York," the single-mindedness of love dramatically derails the relationship between a girl and her mother, while in "Sister Imelda" and "The Creature" the strong ties between teacher and student and mother and son are ultimately broken. "The Love Object" recounts a passionate affair between the narrator and her older lover.

The magnificent, mid-career title story from Lantern Slides portrays a Dublin dinner party that takes on the lives and loves of all the guests. More recent stories include "Shovel Kings" — "a masterpiece of compression, distilling the pain of a lost, exiled generation" (Sunday Times) — and "Old Wounds," which follows the revival and demise of the friendship between two elderly cousins.

In 2011, Edna O'Brien's gifts were acknowledged with the most prestigious international award for the story, the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. The Love Object illustrates a career's worth of shimmering, potent prose from a writer of great courage, vision, and heart.

"The most striking aspect of Edna O'Brien's short stories, aside from the consistent mastery with which they are executed, is their diversity."-John Banville

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316378284
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	02/07/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	413,786
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.38(d)

About the Author

Edna O'Brien is the author of The Country Girls trilogy, The Light of Evening, The Love Object, and many other acclaimed books. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, O'Brien has lived in London for many years.

Editorial Reviews

"Brilliant and memorable.... There is a harmony among all these stories that makes a whole."

—John Casey, New York Times Book Review, "100 Notable Books of 2015"

From the Publisher

The confidence and authority of Ms. O'Brien's writing, and the humor and sexiness that flow through it, mark her as a figure at the top of the food chain. The Love Object, a new volume of her selected short stories, written between 1968 and 2011, consolidates this position. It's a book of deep and complicated and sometimes rude pleasures…It's tempting to remark that sex and class and vanity and disappointment are Ms. O'Brien's central themes, but that's a hollow statement—those are all of our themes, mine at least, and probably yours, too. What matters is how consistently observant she is about them, how her sentences ring and ring again. There are echoes of James Joyce's stories and of William Trevor's, but the sound is unmistakably her own.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Some friends of mine, eager and literate, don't like story collections. They don't like reading 20 pages or so and having to start all over again with what comes next. Others, reaching for a loftier aesthetic, say they want a book to be a coherent whole; they want to get to the end and have a sense of the whole in a wordless afterglow. Yes. Certainly yes. And yet these selected stories gave me that pleasure. I noticed, for example, that an old favorite, "Sister Imelda," is a close cousin to "Old Wounds," the last story in the collection. There is a harmony among all these stories that makes a whole. I can no more name it than the narrator of "Old Wounds" can explain why she wishes to be buried in the family cemetery among her fractious cousins. I can only say that "Old Wounds" is the right place to end the volume, whether it was by choice or through a coincidence of chronology. It echoes all the illuminations, both of grace and disgrace, in these brilliant and memorable stories.

The New York Times Book Review - John Casey

03/02/2015
O’Brien, who introduced an Irish female perspective to the 1960s literary landscape, has produced stories over the last half-century that resonate with charm and acerbity, lyricism and terseness, nostalgia and brute force. Her early stories depict an Ireland of isolated villages and poor mountain farms where, in a moment, dreams turn to hopelessness, innocence to shame. Autobiographical tales feature mothers recalling days in America, schoolgirls bristling at convent education, and country lasses escaping to London. In “Irish Revel,” a farm girl bicycles into town for a party only to find herself moving furniture and cooking dinner. In “Sister Imelda,” the title character returns from university lonely and apart, an exile “in the mind.” Spirited Eily of “A Scandalous Woman” ends up trapped in a spiritless marriage, and the protagonist of “The Conner Girls,” like Chekhovian figurines, are trapped by their own lack of will. “Mrs. Reinhardt” and “A Rose in New York” exemplify stories exploring relationships between women. Men are mostly observed by women, as in “The Love Object,” which details a London divorcée’s affair with a married man. “Brother” depicts a particularly vicious man through his sister’s murderous eyes. “The Shovel Kings” shows sympathy for Irish laborers in England. John Banville’s introduction to the collection highlights O’Brien’s technique as well as her Irish roots. The stories validate his admiration—O’Brien’s self-described gallery of “strange” and “sacrificial” Irish women is indispensable. (May)

Publishers Weekly

★ 04/01/2015
Near the beginning of "A Rose in the Heart of Brooklyn" there appears the sentence "Why be a woman." This question punctuated as a declaration disorients readers; it challenges their expectations while underscoring a sense of resignation or even defeat. Such brilliant ambiguities lie at the heart of the 31 stories in this anthology from Irish author O'Brien, widely hailed for her mastery of description and characterization. O'Brien's depictions of people and the social and emotional forces that define the relationships between them are subtly and surprisingly evoked. In the classic title story, for example, a professional woman describes a passionate affair with a married man that eventually cools into a sad, bearable friendship. Most of the early stories focus on women and the ways power manifests itself in their relationships, most profoundly between mothers and daughters. Later stories, such as the brilliant "Shovel Kings" and "Inner Cowboy," reveal the complex social politics governing how men interact. VERDICT O'Brien's reputation as one of the greatest storytellers in modern literature is only strengthened by this volume's publication. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/24/14.]—John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Library Journal

Various voice actors rise to the challenge of narrating this collection of works by Edna O'Brien, whose stories John Banville asserts in his introduction "provide . . . a cumulative portrait of Ireland." All the narrators share certain qualities, such as the reflective tone that brings out what Banville calls the Chekhovian quality of O'Brien's writing. But the strength of the audiobook as a whole lies in the diversity of Irish voices that express the yearnings of the varied characters. Voices range from that of a naïve country girl at her first party to that of a melancholic woman looking back on her life through the lens of experience. A rich collection of stories and voices. E.M.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2015 - AudioFile

Various voice actors rise to the challenge of narrating this collection of works by Edna O'Brien, whose stories John Banville asserts in his introduction "provide . . . a cumulative portrait of Ireland." All the narrators share certain qualities, such as the reflective tone that brings out what Banville calls the Chekhovian quality of O'Brien's writing. But the strength of the audiobook as a whole lies in the diversity of Irish voices that express the yearnings of the varied characters. Voices range from that of a naïve country girl at her first party to that of a melancholic woman looking back on her life through the lens of experience. A rich collection of stories and voices. E.M.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

AUGUST 2015 - AudioFile

★ 2015-02-17
A career's selection of stories to savor.These 31 stories by O'Brien (The Country Girls Trilogy, 1986, etc.), spanning some four decades, are brought together in the sort of volume meant to establish a legacy and win prizes. The Irish-raised, London-based author hasn't been praised for her short stories with the same reverence as William Trevor or Alice Munro (the Nobel Prize winner who provides a rapturous blurb here, proclaiming that O'Brien writes "the most beautiful, aching stories of any writer, anywhere"). Perhaps her novels, memoir, and persona have distracted attention from her mastery of short fiction, which reveals itself over the course of this generous selection as the focus moves from Irish girlhood to the literary life in large, cosmopolitan cities. Not that these stories are necessarily autobiographical or that it even matters if they are. The power of the first-person narrative in a perfect, and perfectly wrenching, story such as "My Two Mothers" rings truer than a memoir might, as O'Brien describes a relationship with a mother who is somehow both lover and enemy, the breach caused when "I began to write," the story itself a meditation on life, literature, and "being plunged into the moiling seas of memory." Hers is not the sort of writing that indulges in what one story dismisses as "clever words and hollow feelings"; her stories ask impossibly difficult questions about the nature of love and the possibility of happiness, and they refuse to settle for easy answers. As she writes in "Manhattan Medley," a tale of infidelity in a city and a world filled with it, "the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give." Beneath the veneer of sophistication in a story such as "Lantern Slides," the emotional ravages are as deep as in the hardscrabble stories of rural Ireland. With an introduction by John Banville and a dedication to Philip Roth, this collection positions O'Brien among the literary heavyweights, where it confirms she belongs.

Kirkus Reviews