"Hardscrabble" Lives

Irish Girl

by Tim Johnston

2009, University of North Texas Press

Recently, I had an opportunity to see David Sedaris read for the second time in a year read at Boston Symphony Hall. Mr. Sedaris is one of my favorite writers and he is an absolute delight to hear read his sardonic, but incredibly vulnerable, prose.

Sedaris recommends a book written by another writer each time he goes on a new book tour. Last year, he was peddling The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders (for whom I did not particularly care until he published an adorable little story called "Fox 8" in a recent McSweeney's). Sedaris reads from these volumes as part of what I hesitate to call his set. When I saw him most recently, he had selected a book of short stories that recently won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for short fiction, called Irish Girl. He read a very short excerpt and prefaced his selection by insisting that the stories within the collection were very, very dark.

Irish Girl isn't really as dark as I was led to believe. It's stories are reminiscent of Carver in their focus on blue collar people fumbling their already broken (what a jacket writer would prefer to call hardscrabble) lives.

Tim Johnston's stories are full of empathy for his characters even as he tortures them with the full range of his deus ex machina abilities. Johnston's stories, while well-written, are essentially one of many collections in which uncommonly bad things happen to uncommonly normal people.

The title story of the collection was a notable exception. "Irish Girl" tells the story of a young boy who idolizes his older delinquent brother. He forms a special bond with this brother and watches as his brother smokes pot and cigarettes and generally carouses with other maladjusted teenagers.

The boy's father tries desperately to eliminate the possibly corrosive influence the older boy has on his younger brother, but in doing so alienates the older boy with his judgmental outbursts. The younger boy is swept away by his brother as a birthday present and spends the evening with his friends, including the incredibly beautiful titular Irish girl. At the end of the evening, the boy is dropped home by his brother who disdains to spend an evening with the harried father and is subsequently hit by a train in his car. The younger boy's relationship with his father is forever altered after the tragedy.

While I summarize at length (and also comprehensively), I cannot fully convey the beautiful, sad horror of this story, of what it means to be torn from a parent by allegiance to a spurious idol, of the father's sadness and frustration at his inability to preserve a child's innocence.

The entire collection is very readable and I wouldn't shoo anyone away from reading it in its entirety. However, it is the highly visceral title story with its elegiac tone and empathetic point of view that makes Johnston memorable.