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Maeve Brennans collection The Springs of Affection was one of the best reviewed books of 1997. A volume of linked…
tales of the authors native Dublin, it enlarged the reputation of a too-often overlooked writer, a Flaubertian perfectionist revered by her New Yorker colleagues as one of the finest stylists the magazine ever produced. Now, with The Rose Garden, the remainder of her fiction -- much of it previously uncollected -- is at last restored to print, and Maeve Brennan stands revealed as one of the century's great short-story writers. In five of these twenty stories, we return to Brennan's Dublin, which like Joyce's is a place of paralyzed souls, unexpressed love, and scaldingly wicked humor. Another group of stories -- a satirical study of Herbert's Retreat, a snug and smug community just up the Hudson River from New York -- concerns the Irish in America, the hired help of a set of money-conscious, social-climbing suburbanites. Still others take us into the cheap hotels and inexpensive restaurants of Times Square and Greenwich Village, and into the mind of Bluebell, an aging city dog -- a female black Lab, to be exact -- who lives on her memories of the country and the seashore.