Under the Duvet: Shoes, Reviews, Having the Blues, Builders, Babies, Families and Other Calamities
By Marian Keyes
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Irish Girls About Town
By Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly and others
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When the novelist Marian Keyes was growing up in Ireland, she wished that the St. Patrick's Day parade in Dublin had a few Disney characters in it. Somehow all the brass bands seemed less attractive than, say, Bambi and Thumper.
Keyes makes the observation in her essay collection, Under the Duvet, and adds that the parade changed while she was living in London in early adulthood. By the time she returned to Dublin, a lackluster event had turned into an international extravaganza with fire-eaters, women in spangled bikinis, and "elaborate mini-worlds" passing by on trucks. She doesn't quite come right out and say it, but the parade had become a cross between a Rose Bowl parade and a Christina Aguilera MTV video.
All this offers a telling glimpse of Dublin and raises interesting questions about why the changes occurred. Did the city want to increase tourism, or did it get tired of hearing its parades compared unfavorably to those in New York and Chicago? Or did the changes reflect a deeper cultural or political shift, such as an easing of political relations with Northern Ireland?
Keyes might seem well positioned to provide answers. After a half dozen comic novels that include Sushi for Beginners and Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married, she may be more popular in America than any Irish female writer except Maeve Binchy. And she has a conversational prose style that adapts easily to a green-tinged spectrum of topics.
But Keyes tends to confuse glibness with wit and to punt when she has a chance to look beyond the glossy surfaces of the parade and other subjects of her book, which include her fear of dogs, the difficulty of buying a house in Ireland, and the perils of telling jokes through a interpreter on a German publicity tour. Many of the essays in Under the Duvet appeared in Irish Tatler, where she was clearly overindulged by editors who failed to hold her to the standards of either the best Irish newspapers or the English edition of Tatler that is widely available in the United States.
Keyes does best when she doesn't strain for comic effect. The strongest piece in Under the Duvet is a thoughtful essay Keyes wrote for the Irish Times, which deals with the religious views of her peers and notes that "as recently as the mid-'80s Ireland functioned almost as a theocracy." Today the country straddles a spiritual fault line: Older people uphold traditional Catholic values while younger ones experiment with a New Age potpourri - crystals, meditation, reiki, I Ching, feng shui, white-magic spells. Irish men and women in their 30s tend to have a consumerist view of religion: "We insist on utilitarianism - it has to enhance our lives in some manner and make us feel better."
That view finds support in Irish Girls About Town, a pop fiction collection that brings together 16 short stories by some of Ireland's bestselling female authors and brims with young characters in whose lives religion plays a marginal-to-nonexistent role. You won't find Edna O'Brien or the late Molly Keane in this book, which is as foamy as green beer. But you will find Keyes, Binchy, Cathy Kelly and other crowd-pleasers.
Most of the stories in Irish Girls About Town end happily, and some are fairy-tale romances. But a few have surprisingly bleak themes for a volume advertised as "the ultimate feel-good book." The lonely 46-year-old heroine of Annie Sparrow's "The Unlovable Woman" misses her best chance for love because she deludes herself about her ability to recognize it. And a naive young typist in Mary Ryan's ironically titled "A Good Catch," living on her own for the first time, has to be rescued from the near-disastrous results of her failure to see that a woman in her building may be a prostitute. Stories like these add salt to a sugary collection and bring a timely reminder that, when it comes to love, the luck of the Irish will get you only so far.
- Reviewer Janice Harayda wrote the comedy of manners "The Accidental Bride" (Griffin Trade Paperback, $13.95).
"Under the Duvet: Shoes, Reviews, Having the Blues, Builders, Babies, Families and Other Calamities," by Marian Keyes, Perennial, $12.95, 286 pages.
"Irish Girls About Town," by Maeve Binchy, Marian Keyes, Cathy Kelly and others, Pocket Books, $7.99, 337 pages.
