Anne Enright's Blog, page 8

A highly accomplished debut story collection is full of tiny pleasures

Mary Costello has written for many years with an occasional story published, but no great encouragement to keep her at her desk. If she is an emerging writer, then she has emerged with great slowness and care. This first collection has the feel of work that refused to be abandoned; of stories that were written for the sake of getting something important right. A few, perhaps the earliest, have an old-fashioned, derivative air, but when she breaks into the world of contemporary Ireland, Costello's work is true, her problems distinctive and the voice all her own.

This is a writer unafraid of the graveside, or the bedside, of filling the space of the story to the brim. Large events happen in small lives – people die, for a start, they fall in and out of love, they have children and affairs. The slow leaking of love out of a relationship is described in particular and terrible banality, as Costello's characters move about their ordinary rooms. There is a kind of immaculate suburban sadness in many of these tales.

Costello's characters are lonely, especially when they are in a relationship. This loneliness is almost precious; it is certainly made sweeter by infidelity. Sexual betrayal is a recurring theme, not just as escape, but as transcendence. In "Sleeping With a Stranger", a school inspector recalls an extramarital episode while sitting with his dying mother. There is no guilt; in fact he experiences something like the opposite of guilt, and the rhapsodic ending recalls the surging epiphanies of Flannery O'Connor.

But though she sometimes likes to sing it out, Costello's best effects are quiet. After his mother stops breathing, the man looks down at her slippers on the floor. "The sight of them, their patient waiting, moved him. He bent down and took them on his lap and put a hand inside each one." This precision, which is so moving, is not only gestural, it is found in the texture of Costello's prose. Leaving his hotel encounter, the man "rose and dressed and went down in the lift, his legs barely able to ferry him". The word "ferry", so natural and particular, unhinges the sentence and lets emotion flood in. It is the accumulation of tiny pleasures such as this that makes The China Factory such a satisfying and accomplished debut.

In "Little Disturbances", a farmer avoids going to the doctor, knowing his test results can not be good. Dying is not a concern; it is life that makes him tremble. He walks the land, steering clear of the "swallow holes" in the bog because he is afraid of "the pull" of water. "There was something in him and he thought the water knew it." When he asks his wife to go to the surgery in his stead, she looks away. "She has a way of being distant that makes him think he is already invisible. One day at the dinner she turned to him and said, 'Can you not chew any quieter?' In winter her eyes are bluer – he used to think the cold got in."

Death is always present in these stories, and it brings a sense of fate that is quite unashamed. Like Alice Munro, Costello is not afraid of a good car accident, a cancer diagnosis, the arrival on the scene of a roaring madman. Like many Irish writers, she does not eschew the child given away in adoption. She writes things that happen all the time but get labelled as "gothic" – perhaps because they happen to most people only once, if at all. Her talent is for placing them in the quotidian. In "The Patio Man" a builder is obliged to drive the woman of the house to hospital as she suffers a miscarriage. To distract themselves along the way, they talk about the house he will build himself someday in the west. "They'll think you're the father," she says, as he parks outside the hospital. As he drives away, alone, he "thinks of things he has not thought of before, about women's lives. It is not the same for men at all."

There is a country cadence in Costello's sentences; her characters yearn westwards towards the Atlantic and the hills and fields of their childhood homes. But she remains true to a dislocation that is more than geographical and is wary of "the landscape solution" so prevalent in Irish prose. Costello insists on the distance between lovers and on the connections between strangers. Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand – call them themes; they are the kind of problem that make a writer. With a bit of luck, they could keep her at the desk for the rest of her life.

• Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz is published by Vintage.

Short storiesFictionAnne Enright
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A narrator who walks the high wire of the reader's sympathy

Aislinn Kelly should be really annoying, but isn't; and this is such a great trick, it makes you wonder how she walks the high wire of our sympathy. She is the narrator of the latest book by Gwendoline Riley, a writer who likes to keep things close. Riley gives us first-person narratives from people who are a lot like her, being writers and drifters; young women who don't quite know what is wrong with them, or whether they want to put it right. Nonchalance and authenticity are almost the same thing here, though both words are a little strong, in the circumstances. Riley keeps her sentences smart, affectless and most wonderfully flat.

Nothing much happens to Aislinn over the course of this novel. She talks about her stupid, creepy father, fights with her American boyfriend, has conversations with friends, and goes to her mother's retirement party. She also spends some time in Indianapolis, writing. The dialogue is the opposite of sparkling. Aislinn's father uses "er" as a weapon and the off-the-beat use of italics reads like a threat. He sends a series of unanswerable emails to Aislinn when she is at college, one in response to her first book: "Oh dear! Oof! Posing! Er, what?"

Her stepdad is no great shakes either, with his bad clothes and insistence on speaking in funny voices. Her mother thinks of emotion as something that happens to other people: "Oh no I didn't feel anything," she says about viewing the dead bodies of her own parents. "No, nothing. Not with either of them."

Though she loves the way they talk, friends do not provide Aislinn with much respite. There is the miserable, "more or less – inanimate" Bronagh, who "used somehow to seep into my vicinity, when I was feeling low". A college roommate, Cathy, seems a decent sort, but she also starts to grate – perhaps it is the clothes, or the religious inclinations.

A couple of male friends are unproblematic, if not always fragrant, and there is the American boyfriend Jim, a singer-songwriter. Jim and Aislinn have a fight walking down the street, and his final insult, "like he'd found the right spot at last, the magic button", is that she is "'too literary' … And he couldn't even pronounce it: 'too litter-y' he kept saying, 'too litter-y'." This anecdote elicits one of the most apt responses to the figure of the critic ever penned, as her friend Karl says, "My God. Why didn't he just shit in your head?"

A first-person narrative is by nature self-enclosed. Any small narcissism puts us back on the outside; we become alert to signs of "vanity" and "self-pity"; we reject the narrator who enjoys introspection in the "wrong" way. This seems to apply, rather unfairly, more to women narrators than to men. There can be no mirrors in a book like this, and Riley manages the bargain very well. Even the slips she makes are salutary. "I don't really do food," Aislinn says, provoking an irritation from this reviewer – whether as eater or mother, I was not sure, but realising, in my uncertainty, that reading is close to nurture, in its intimacy.

The guys in Jim's band always had "such a crush" on Aislinn, "this English author", and we suspect she is good-looking, though this is never said. Opposed Positions is not a book about rejection so much as dissatisfaction. Aislinn is not like the heroines of Jean Rhys, who dress their desire in a ghastly hat, put the wrong man in front of it, and wait to be turned down. She is not unwanted, just complicated, in some way that is hard to describe: "when it came to sex, I mean – the truth was I had no impulses in that direction back then. No impulses at all."

And though she hasn't slept with Jim for some years, she does have sex with a guy – "pretty fit, as it goes" – towards the end of the book. "I have very little memory of sleeping with him, though." Trying to explain, she reaches for a quote from Philip Roth: "I can not afford the luxury of a self." Writing is an attempt to locate that self, through "some process of triangulation". This is an urgent task and there is a real sense of personal risk in these pages, a huge investment in getting the words right.

I am not sure Riley needs Philip Roth when she has Gwendoline Riley, a woman who shows herself more than up to the job of writing the wasted hinterlands of the human heart. Opposed Positions is also an enjoyable book. A narrator who should be irritating for being self-involved manages to be intriguing and sad. Aislinn Kelly is cool. She is smart, and accurate, she can write a dynamite sentence that manages to sound entirely bland. She has an eye for the flip and the sarcastic, she observes, maintains distance, doesn't put out. She brings nothing to the party, except herself, but she's the girl you remember, over in the corner, not drinking much.

• Anne Enright's latest novel is The Forgotten Waltz (Vintage).

FictionGwendoline RileyAnne Enright
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Anne Enright rose to fame when her novel The Gathering won the Booker prize in 2007. Here, she discusses her latest novel, The Forgotten Waltz.

Set against the backdrop of the financial crash, The Forgotten Waltz deals with the repercussions of an office affair. She talks to John Mullan about the theme of adultery in literature, what the book says about Ireland today and the reaction it has received at home and abroad.

John MullanAnne EnrightClaire ArmitsteadTim Maby

Anne Enright rose to fame when her novel The Gathering won the Booker prize in 2007. Here, she discusses her latest novel, The Forgotten Waltz.

Set against the backdrop of the financial crash, The Forgotten Waltz deals with the repercussions of an office affair. She talks to John Mullan about the theme of adultery in literature, what the book says about Ireland today and the reaction it has received at home and abroad.

John MullanAnne EnrightClaire ArmitsteadTim Maby

Week three: Anne Enright on writing The Forgotten Waltz

I have a theory that if you stay at home for three months, and do nothing, and manage not to panic, by the end of that time you will have your book. This was what I was doing in early 2009, when, in the second week of February, it snowed. Ireland was in economic freefall, people's lives were changing from week to week, and just when we needed it least, the place shut down.

That Thursday, I drove and slid the length of the country to a funeral, with various members of my family in the car. We made our way with great difficulty to the graveyard, where the stones were neck deep in snow and the grave was a bright rectangle of green AstroTurf, against the white hillside. In the hotel afterwards, I caught the suspicious look that Irish writers get (and fully deserve) on such occasions – "Don't you dare put this in a book." But I had no intentions of putting it in a book. I was meeting relatives I had not seen in 30 years and the wonder of it lay, not in the past, but in the astonishing present; the way we had all turned into ourselves, by growing up.

When I made it home that night, I looked out of the window at the snow under the streetlamp, at the orange highlights and the shadows of violet, and I knew how Gina, my character, would feel, looking at this snow, some miles away. Maybe it was because I was exhausted, but it was as though she was looking over my shoulder, or I was looking over hers. And I said: "This is the day of my book."

One of the first volumes I pulled from the shelf that winter was The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. I still remember the tiny, crucial sense of release I felt when I read it at college, just after Middlemarch. I did not know a "great" book could be so personal, or so uncertain. "This is the saddest story I have ever heard," the narrator famously says, but the real grief lies in the distance between what he tells us and what we slowly come to realise. The tragedy of the book is how a man so alert to other people's feelings can be almost unaware of his own, until it is too late.

The Good Soldier is also one of the best novels written about adultery. This time, looking at the mechanics of it, I was struck by the figure of "the girl". The soldier, Edward Ashburnham's final adulterous love is for his own ward, a girl just reaching adulthood, and this torments him beyond bearing. I thought it was wonderful, that love should be the best punishment for desire. I was also intrigued by the fact that the girl needs scarcely any description and no explanation: she simply must be loved.

I am fascinated by the way we love children. It seems we have no option: children are mysterious creatures, and they magnify and distort our own deepest happiness, or lack of it. So I stole the figure of "the girl" for my own uses and I called her Evie. She was all there from page one, and the thing that surprised me, as I wrote the book, was how much I loved her.

There is an amount of mischief in The Forgotten Waltz. I found myself, after the success of my previous novel, The Gathering, in the surprising position of being able to tease, a little, the snobbery and sexism that exists in the literary world. I did this, and it gave me great pleasure, by writing a book set in an important historical moment (the collapse of the Irish banking system) but using an "unimportant" subject (the foolishness of a woman in love). I was also mischievous, I have to admit, when I wrote the character of Gina. I wanted mixed feelings from the reader, not a sense of beautiful clarity, because although beautiful clarity may be what we seek in books, mixed feelings are what we actually have about people in real life. Writing a contentious character also disturbs the smooth response of the literary snob. "These days everyone has an opinion," someone in the business said to me. "All those women in their book clubs." I think she meant (and it was a she), that these people were terribly annoying, but I had spent a year meeting readers and I rather thought those women were my kind of chick, thank you very much; that, on a different day, that reader was me.

• Next week John Mullan will be looking at readers' responses.

Anne EnrightAnne Enright
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A precise memoir about a schizophrenic sibling

Every once in a while, a writer's voice hits such a clear note, the resulting book has the kind of sweetness that makes you hold it in your hands a moment before finding a place for it on your shelves. Circles Around the Sun is this kind of book: it's a keeper. A memoir of a schizophrenic brother, written with great care and simplicity, it is one of those stories that waited until its writer was ready to tell it.

Molly McCloskey is an American author who has lived in Nairobi, Kosovo and Ireland. She was born 14 years after her brother Mike, so she was only a child when he first became a worry to his parents. It is always somehow hard to see your family properly, and this difficulty is compounded when they become obscured by mental illness. Who is Mike McCloskey? His sister goes through early photographs looking for clues. Here he is as a toddler: "His fair skin and blond hair lend him a radiance, as though he exists in a flash of sunlight." And again as a boy: "Thin as a rail, with freckles and a brush cut he flips in the front with a bit of Butch wax." This "fragile", "angelic" boy will be, in middle age, unkempt, a chain smoker, who walks with "the thorazine shuffle" and speaks with the flattened affect of schizophrenia.

The McCloskeys are a good-looking family. Her parents were so handsome and wholesome they featured in a 14-page photo spread in Ladies Home Journal in September 1953. Loving, frugal, outgoing, they were portrayed as the ideal postwar couple. Molly's father was, at the time of Mike's early decline, the coach of a failing basketball team. He subsequently turned his career around, by bringing the Detroit Pistons to win the National Basketball Association league.

Mike too was competitive, and he got a basketball scholarship to college. His life, in the American way, might have peaked just there – if only the ball had found the net. But success seemed already too problematic for Mike and his story was, for a while, the story of the 1960s, as he took drugs, went on road trips and dropped out. Mike was the guy – and we all know someone like him – who disappeared into adolescence and never made it back.

What makes McCloskey's tale distinctive is the steadiness of her questioning gaze on the problem of personality and what it is to be "well". As college becomes more difficult, his girlfriend notices how Mike's sweetness became "overlaid with something false and stylised, like he was straining to detach himself from who he had been, and with unconvincing results."

Schizophrenia makes Mike somehow less authentic to his sister, as if the whole business was a kind of bad faith. Nor does the fact that he is helpless make him nice. The adult Mike sees himself as living among "retards" and McCloskey nails the feeling of inadequacy the mentally ill engender; how they can make ordinary people feel so guilty and inadequate. "Despite his disdain for the niceties of human relations," she writes, "there was an expectation that we would not call him on his own fabrications or delusions." On a visit in 2007, she felt "as transparent before him as I had when I was 12 and he'd turned his condescending gaze on me and laughed out loud as I walked by. 'You look lonely,' he said, and sat down."

The love between children and parents makes some sense to us; what McCloskey tries to understand is the fugitive, surprising and constantly reconstructed love that exists between siblings. She looks at Mike and wonders not just who he is now, but whether he is also a key to her; a piece of information that lies latent in her own genes?

McCloskey was in her youth a catastrophic drinker – she seemed to bring a kind of American innocence to the project. She lived for some years in County Sligo, not short of good pubs, and gave up alcohol after a bad Christmas binge there. It is tempting to think of her as an amateur among the more seasoned, hard-working drinkers of that place, but she describes sobriety with the tenderness of the true drunk: "In the beginning," she says, "I just felt forgiven."

If there is something to be learned from these pages, it is the redeeming power of something well described. Precision may, after all, be a kind of prayer. Molly McCloskey is a fine fiction writer, whose drift away from the United States has made her work hard to label: we are, perhaps, more attuned to the voices of migrants who travel the other way. She writes as someone displaced: open-minded, exact. Word by word she makes her way home.

Anne Enright's The Forgotten Waltz is published by Jonathan Cape.

Autobiography and memoirAnne Enright
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Ireland has produced some of the world's most celebrated short story writers – and continues to do so. Why are the Irish so good at the form, and why do they love it so much, asks Anne Enright

The short story is, for me, a natural form, as difficult and as easy to talk about as, say, walking. Do we need a theory about going for a walk? About one foot, in front of the other? Probably, yes. "I made the story just as I'd make a poem," writes Raymond Carver, "one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story – and I knew it was my story, the one I had been wanting to write." 

It is the simple things that are the most mysterious. 

"Do you know if what you are writing is going to be a short story or a novel?" This is one of the questions writers get asked all the time. The answer is "Yes," because the writer also thinks in shapes. But it is foolish asking a writer how much they know, when they spend so much time trying not to know it.  

This is what the American writer Flannery O'Connor did not know about her iconic story "Good Country People": "When I started writing that story, I didn't know there was going to be a PhD with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realised it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn't know he was going to steal that wooden leg until 10 or 12 lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realised it was inevitable." 

She does not say when she knew she was writing a short story, as opposed to the first chapter of a novel – or a radio play, or the rough draft of an epic poem – at a guess, it was quite early on. The writer's ignorance may be deliberate, but it plays itself out in an established space. The sentence is one such space; the story is another. In both cases, form and surprise are the same thing, and the pleasures of inevitability are also the pleasures of shape. 

This is not an argument for a lyrical as opposed to a social theory of the short story: characters are part of it too; the way people do unexpected things, even if you have invented them yourself. The short story delivers what O'Connor calls "the experience of meaning"; the surprise that comes when things make sense. 

Much of what is said about the short story as a form is actually anxiety about the novel – so it is worth saying that we do not know how the novel delivers meaning, but we have some idea of how the short story might. There is something irreducible about it: "A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way," says O'Connor, "and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is." The novel, on the other hand, is not finished by its own meaning, which is why it must grow a structure or impose one; making the move from story to plot. 

Short stories seldom creak, the way novels sometimes creak; they are allowed to be easy and deft. Some writers say that the short story is too "easy" to matter much, some say it is the most difficult form of all. But if the argument is about ease as opposed to difficulty, then surely we should not under value ease. And though it may be easy to write something that looks like a short story (for being not long), it is very hard to write a good one – or to be blessed by a good one – so many of the ones we read are fakes. 

The great Irish short story writer Frank O'Connor thought it a pure form, "motivated by its own necessities rather than by our convenience". I am not sure whether the novel is written for our convenience, but it is probably written for our satisfaction. That is what readers complain about with short stories, that they are not "satisfying". They are the cats of literary form; beautiful, but a little too self-contained for some readers' taste. Short stories are, however, satisfying to write, because they are such achieved things. They become themselves even as you write them: they end once they have attained their natural state.  

Or some of them do. Others keep going. Others discard the first available meaning for a later, more interesting conclusion. In the interests of truth, some writers resist, backpedal, downplay, switch tacks, come back around a different way. Poe's famous unity of impulse is all very well, but if you know what the impulse is already, then it will surely die when you sit down at the desk. 

There are stories in The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story that I have chosen because they are beautifully made, like Seán O'Faoláin's "The Trout", and there are some that are slightly untidy, but good anyway. This is what O'Faoláin himself called "personality", saying that what he liked in a short story was "punch and poetry". The tension is always between the beauty of the poem and the felt life of the novel form.

Frank O'Connor bridged the gap between the aesthetic and the cultural in a more romantic way. "There is in the short story at its most characteristic," he writes, "something we don't often find in the novel, an intense awareness of human loneliness." His book, The Lonely Voice, which was published in 1963, is still a touchstone in any discussion of the short story form. The question he asked – as this collection also asks – was why Irish writers excel at the short story. The answer, for him, lay in the loneliness to be found among "submerged population groups". These are people on the margins of society; the outlawed, the dreaming and the defeated. "The short story has never had a hero," says O'Connor, offering instead a slightly infantilising idea of "the Little Man" (as though all novels were about big ones). Americans can be "submerged", because America is made up of immigrant communities, but the proper subjects of the short story are: "Gogol's officials, Turgenev's serfs, Maupassant's prostitutes, Chekhov's doctors and teachers," and, we might note, not a single English person of any kind. The novel requires "the concept of a normal society", and though this, O'Connor seems to say, is available to the English, there is in Irish society a kind of hopelessness that pushes the artist away. The resulting form, the short story, "remains by its nature remote from the community – romantic, individualistic and intransigent". 

In his useful essay on the subject, "Inside Out: A Working Theory of the Short Story", John Kenny says that the short story has flourished "in those cultures where older, usually oral forms, are met head on with the challenge of new literary forms equipped with the idealogy of modernisation". O'Connor's theories place the short story as the genre of the cusp between tradition and modernity. The story is born from the fragmentation of old certainties and the absence of any new ones, and this produces in the writer a lyric response, "a retreat into the self in the face of an increasingly complex . . . reality". The first thing to say about O'Connor's ideas is that they rang true at the time. Whether or not the short story is, in essence, an assertion of the self – small, but powerfully individual – to the writer it certainly felt that way.

It is interesting to test that sense of "the Little Man" against a new, more confident, Irish reality; one in which good writing continues to thrive. Is "submerged" just another word for "poor"? Is the word "peasant" hovering somewhere around? There is so much nostalgia about Ireland – especially rural Ireland – it is important to say that this is not the fault of its writers. They may be closer to the oral arts of folktale, fable, gossip and anecdote, but speech is also a modern occupation. Irish novels may often reach into the past, but the stories gathered here show that the form is light and quick enough to be contemporary. 

If you want to see life as it is lived "now" (whenever the "now" of the story might be), just look at the work of Neil Jordan, Roddy Doyle or, indeed, Frank O'Connor. Meanwhile, whoever thinks the short story harmless for being closer to a "folk" tradition has not read John McGahern, whose stories are the literary equivalent of a hand grenade rolled across the kitchen floor.

Seán O'Faoláin, that other pillar of 20th-century Irish short story, was wary of the lyrical view. In his book The Short Story, published in 1948, he writes: "Irish literature in our time came to its great period of efflorescence in a romantic mood whose concept of a writer was almost like the concept of a priest: you did not just write, you lived writing; it was a vocation; it was part of the national resurgence to be a writer."

Indeed, the number of stories about priests and the sadness of priests that have not made it into this volume are legion – parish priests, curates, bishops, all lonely, all sad as they survey the folly of their congregations, and 99% of them celibate. I left most of them out for seeming untrue, and offered instead a couple of stories, by Maeve Brennan and Colm Tóibín, about the more interesting loneliness of the priest's mother.  

In the same way that it might be said that much of what is written about the short story form is actually anxiety about the unknowability of the novel (which we think we know so well), perhaps much of what is written about Irish writing is, in fact, anxiety about England. Sometimes, indeed, the terms "England" and "the novel" seem almost interchangeable.

Perhaps it is all a yearning for what O'Connor called "the concept of a society". In its absence, we must do what we can. And if we can't be as good as them, we'll just have to be better, which is to say, more interesting. O'Faoláin says it pretty much straight out: what he likes in a short story is personality, and the problem with the English is that they don't have any. "The fact is that the English do not admire the artistic temperament: they certainly do not demonstrate it." Dullness is their national ambition and preoccupation. "In short, the English way of life is much more social and much less personal and individual than the French." 

O'Faoláin can't quite fit America into this scheme: "Why America should produce interesting personalities in the short story I simply do not understand unless it be that American society is still unconventionalised." Even Frank O'Connor's "submerged" Americans surface with some rapidity. I don't want to dishonour O'Connor or O'Faoláin, who are heroes to me now as they were to me in my youth, and I am certainly not saying that the English are interesting, in any way – God forbid. I am just saying it is there, that's all: that national prejudice is still prejudice, even if you come from a plucky little country such as Ireland, where it's only endearing really, apart from when it's not. 

What interests me is the way O'Connor and O'Faoláin talk, not about how wonderful the Irish are as artists, but how vile they are as critics. O'Faoláin describes the conditions for the Irish artist as "particularly difficult . . . complicated by religion, politics, peasant unsophistication, lack of stimulus, lack of variety, pervasive poverty, censorship, social compression and so on". An ambitious Irishman, O'Connor writes, "can still expect nothing but incomprehension, ridicule and injustice". 

Of course, things are different in the 21st century, now that poverty has been banished (or was, for a whole decade) and the success of our writers is officially a matter of national pride. But it is perhaps still true that if Ireland loves you, then you must be doing something wrong. There is a lingering unease about how Irish writers negotiate ideas about "Ireland" (the country we talk about, as opposed to the place where we live), for readers both at home and abroad. We move, in decreasing circles, around the problem O'Faoláin voiced in 1948. "There was hardly an Irish writer who was not on the side of the movement for Irish political independence; immediately it was achieved they became critical of the nation. This is what makes all politicians say that writers are an unreliable tribe. They are. It is their metier."

I first read O'Connor when I was maybe 10, maybe 12 years of age. I chose his story "The Mad Lomasneys" for the way it stayed with me, quietly, ever since. If you wonder whether this is the selection of a 12-year-old, I admit she is certainly here too, that the reason the short story remains an important form for Irish writers of my generation is because the work of O'Connor and O'Faoláin and Mary Lavin were commonly found on Irish bookshelves, alongside, in my own house, "The Irish Republic" by the nationalist historian Dorothy Macardle, and Three to Get Married by the Rev Fulton J Sheen (the third in question, I was disappointed to discover, being God).

Our sensibilities were shaped by the fine choices of Professor Augustine Martin, who set the stories for the school curriculum, among them "The Road to the Shore", a story that revealed as much to me about aesthetic possibilities and satisfactions as it did about nuns. We were taught French by reading Maupassant and German through the stories of Siegfried Lenz, though if the short story is a national form it did not seem to flourish in the national language of Irish, where all the excitement – for me at least – was in poetry. The fact remains that I grew up with the idea that short stories were lovely and interesting and useful things, in the way the work of Macardle and Sheen was not. 

This may all be very "submerged" of me, but that is to patronise my younger self. I still find the modesty of the form attractive and right. How important is it to be "important" as a writer? The desire to claim a larger authority can provoke work, or it can ruin it. In fact, writers claim different kinds of authority: these days a concentration on the short story form is taken as a sign of writerly purity rather than novelistic incompetence, though it still does not pay the bills. (This was not always the case. O'Faoláin lamented the popularity of the form which "is being vulgarised by commercialisation". Readers and editors," he writes, "must often feel discouraged.")   

"The Mad Lomasneys" is a story by O'Connor that is not much anthologised. This may be, in part, because it does not present a recognisable idea of "Ireland". It does not deal with the birth of the Irish Free State, like "Guests of the Nation", or with childhood innocence like "My Oedipus Complex" or "My First Confession". I did not reject these stories for being too "Irish":  so many of O'Connor's stories are good, I just wanted to see what happens when you give the bag a shake. I realised, when I did this, there are even more stories about choice and infidelity in the Irish tradition than there are about priests. I don't know what this means; why both O'Faoláin and William Trevor, for example, write endlessly about love and betrayal or, to take the problem further, why "either/or" is a question asked by the work of contemporary writers such as Keith Ridgway and Hugo Hamilton, who then answer "both". 

Is choice a particularly Irish problem? What about shame – a streak of which runs through the work collected here? Humiliation, perhaps? Maybe we should call that "the problem of power". There is also the problem of the family, which is the fundamental (perhaps the only) unit of Irish culture, and one which functions beyond our choosing. Until very recently, you could only marry once in Ireland – though this does not answer the question of how many times you can love, or what love is. Catholicism may give Irish writers an edge when it comes to talking about the larger questions, but you could say the adulteries in Trevor owe as much to Shakespearean comedy as to the problem of the Catholic church. In fact, I think Trevor owes much to the English short story tradition (as does the work of Clare Boylan), but let us not confuse things here. Let us keep everyone in the one box, and then talk about the box, its meaning and dimensions, and then let us paint the box green. 

So, perhaps we should move beyond the box to ask the question: are all short stories – Russian, French, American and Irish – in fact about loneliness? I am not sure. This may be part of writers' nonsense about themselves, or O'Connor's nonsense about being Irish, or it may be just be the general nonsense of being alive. Connection and the lack of it is one of the great themes of the short story, but social factors change, ideas of the romantic change, and the more you think about literary forms the smaller your ideas become. Life itself may be a lonely business (or not): the most I have ever managed to say about the short story is that it is about a change. Something has changed. Something is known at the end of a story – or nearly known – that was not known before. "We are on our own" may be one such insight, but others are surely possible. 

I put the selection together as an Irish writer – which is to say, as one of O'Faoláin's "unreliable tribe". Some of the stories made me close the book with a slam. "Music at Annahullion" by Eugene McCabe, for example, defied me to read anything else that day, or that week, to match it. I found it difficult to finish Maeve Brennan's "An Attack of Hunger", because it came so close to the pain it described (is this a good way to whet the reader's appetite, I wonder.) The world in Claire Keegan's "Men and Women" stayed with me from the day I first encountered it. I looked for stories that had made me pause when I read them the first time around: stories such as Colum McCann's "Everything in this Country Must" that I finished in the knowledge that I could not, in any conceivable universe, have written such a thing myself. 

Perhaps Irish writers, like Irish actors, rely more than is usual on personality in that balance of technique and the self that is the secret of style. The trick might be in its suppression, indeed, an effort that must fail, over time. John Banville, Edna O'Brien, McGahern, Tóibín – these writers become more distinctive as people, even as their sentences become more distinctively their own. It is a jealous kind of delight to find on the page some inimicable thing, a particular passion, and if the writer is dead, it is delightful and sad to meet a sensibility that will not pass this way again. The shock of recognition runs through this anthology. As much as possible I have tried to choose those stories in which a writer is most himself. 

A writer has many selves, of course, and an editor has many and mixed criteria – some of them urgent, as I have described, and some more easy. The selection is from writers who were born in the 20th century (cheating a little for Elizabeth Bowen, who was born in 1899); I wanted to put together a book that was varied and good to read, with a strong eye to the contemporary. 

If this selection has anything to say about Irish writing, then it does so by accident. I chose the stories because I liked them, and then stood back a little to see what my choice said – about me, perhaps, but also about how tastes change over time. There is a deal of what O'Faoláin called "personality" at play in the stories chosen here, but, at a guess, not much that he would recognise as "charm", or even (God save the mark) as "Irish charm". It is too easy to move from "personality" to a mannered version of the self, and this can seem a little hokum to us as the years pass. It is possible that, as truths emerged about Ireland, or refused to emerge, Irish prose writers became more blunt or more lyrical, or both at the same time.

Folktale and short story pulled apart over the years – a split made radical in Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's "Midwife to the Fairies" – only to rejoin in the recent work of Claire Keegan. Fashions are darker now. New work is sometimes tainted by misogyny, and this seems to me as lazy a reach as sentimentality was to the writers of the 50s and – who knows? – as likely to look a bit stupid, in years to come (perhaps this is what makes Patrick Boyle's "Meles Vulgaris" so amazing, for being out of joint with his time.) But these are all trends rather than truths, and only to be noted in passing. Time makes some stories more distant, while others come near, for a while. What I wanted to do was to select work that would bring a number of Irish writers close to the reader, today. 

Some great Irish writers – Sebastian Barry, Patrick McCabe, Dermot Healy – love the stretch of the novel or they love misrule. Some, such as Deirdre Madden or Claire Kilroy, need space to think or to plot. But this book celebrates a fact which I have so far failed to explain: that so many Irish writers also love the short story. They defy current wisdom about the books business and, in their continuing attention to the form, refuse to do what they are told. This may be partly because of the small but crucial distance Irish writers keep from the international publishing industry. The stories in this collection were written for their own sake. They were written in rooms in Monaghan or Dublin, in New York, Dún Laoghaire, Devon, Wexford, Belfast, Bucharest. It seems to me remarkable that the members of this scattered tribe, each in their solitude, has managed such a conversation. The stories in this anthology talk to each other in many and unexpected ways. Is this another aspect of the short story that we find unsettling: its promiscuity, its insistence on being partial, glancing, and various? 

My romantic idea of Ireland did not survive the killings in the north, and the realisation, in the 80s, that Irish women were considered far too lovely for contraception: it foundered, you might say, between Dorothy Macardle, and Canon Sheen. Perhaps as a result, I found it difficult to lose myself in the dream that was the recent economic boom. My romantic idea of the writer, meanwhile, did not survive the shift into motherhood – I might have felt lonely and wonderful, but with small children, I just never got the time. But though I am not a romantic, I am quite passionate about the whole business of being an Irish writer. O'Faoláin was right: we are great contrarians. When there is much rubbish talked about a country, when the air is full of large ideas about what we are, or what we are not, then the writer offers truths that are delightful and small. We write against our own foolishness, not anyone else's. In which case the short story is as good a place as any other to keep things real.  

Short storiesAnne Enright
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Silence speaks louder than a flak-jacketed news hack

A woman in Tiriri clinic lies on her side and labours in silence. It is early morning. Her husband, who sits beside her, looks worried, hopeful and forlorn. His wife's gaze has turned inwards, she is already in a different place. She doesn't seem frightened, as perhaps she should be. There is no pain relief here, and a week-old baby in the next room has just lost its mother to septicaemia.

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I didn't write two books last year. I know a lot of people didn't write two books last year, but I didn't write two specific books - one of them was set in the 1930s in Dublin and one was set in the 1940s in Wicklow, and I researched both and mulled over both, I rolled the ideas around in my head, I thought of them when I woke up and I thought of them when I went to sleep, and I ordered yet another book from AbeBooks, thinking that some obscure volume, preferably from a foreign dealer (hello Halifax, Nova Scotia!), might arrive through my door, with the provoking fact, or problem, the missing character or insight I needed in order to make one or both of these books "go".

It wasn't a stressful process. I am not sad to leave them behind (if I have left them behind). It was a question of appetite and enthusiasm, and it had bizarrely little to do with the success or failure of my other books last year - I know this is hard to believe, but it is true. When you're inside the possible world of a new book, tapping the walls, opening cupboards, testing the slope of the floor, then that is where you are - inside it. Sometimes, with a different part of your brain, you wonder: "Will it play?" Is it the right book for this moment - in the culture/my career/my writing life? You do, in other words, worry about location, but only once you have left the space itself. Besides, wondering about location kills the thing straight off. The trick is to concentrate on the quality of the light, or the wonderful arbutus tree, or to worry if mock-Tudor is really your "thing".

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An exclusive Christmas short story by Anne Enright

I am thirty-nine. My friends tell me that their wives are not happy. My male friends, that is - old boyfriends, some of them. I meet them when I go back home, or they look me up when they come through Paris. It is that time of our lives: they ring, "Hello stranger", and we meet for coffee and we catch up on old gossip and new babies and jobs and, late in the conversation, or the next evening when we meet for a quick drink, they tell me that their wives are not happy.

I don't know what I am supposed to do about it.

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