Everyone knows that Ethel Rohan is one the rescuers of domestic realism, snatching the notion of family from the gums of academy hacks to re-energize it with her own lyric volatility. Her latest collection, Hard to Say, is a vampiric stunner of a book, very dark and soulful. Check out this sampler of first lines, some of which read like horror fiction:
“While Mother lay in the hospital dying, my aunts gathered in our dirty kitchen and brewed tea, cried and laughed together.” —Corruptionists
“I didn’t believe my brother was real.”–Kriegspiel
“Disease ate away at Mother’s eyes.”–Stung
“At dusk, at the bottom of our street, fear grabbed at the front of my coat and held me dangling.”– Robbed
“Mother opened the fridge door, her knuckles yellow, and removed the bloodied bag of calf’s liver.”–Raw
My reading tastes, especially in summer, are escapist/prurient, so Thank Pank for the irresistible design of this “Little Books” winner that I might have otherwise back-burnered for a more somber season. Mother-daughter chaos, even the kind set in Dublin, is not a subject I relish, but once I started reading Hard to Say, I found its linked stories absorbing, especially as the narrator struggles to identify the mechanisms of altered understanding—it’s all so mysterious:
“Once, for no good reason, one of our dogs bit an old man in the meatiest part of his calf. Prince tore the man’s skin and drew blood, left holes like BB blasts. The man’s face was a dark tangle of feelings. Prince licked his lips and seemed to smile. Ever after, I was a camera carrying around those pictures. I loved Prince so much, and he loved me, but it was hard to feel the same way about him after that—all the rules changed. That’s how it was with Mother too.”–Corruptionists
By design Hard to Say defies cherry-picking and should be read in a single sitting. BUT—and I tested this—despite its mostly chronological organization you can read it backwards, peeling away from the dark purge of “Mammy” until you reach the lonely mysteries of the self destructive child in “Crust.” In case you ever need to illustrate how a literary work can be identified by its complex dependencies, Hard to Say is a wonderful example. Rohan may well be marching us through time, but that illusion, like cause and effect, is for comfort only. Which brings me to the potency of the material we’re given, as well as that which has been held back. In the final three stories the narrator is an independent woman, living far away from Mother. The glimpses of her autonomy are fascinating, leaving me wanting that dreaded more. I am so sorry, Ethel. The concentrated pleasures of this little book has me wondering when, if ever, we’ll see the big version.