Irish author Boylan excels at observing life's comic ironies

In "The Collected Stories" by the celebrated Irish writer Clare Boylan, men are usually unaffectionate, indifferent, selfish cads, never worth the trouble they make. The heroes of Boylan's fiction are women, unhappy or about to be, looking for love and finding just about everything else.

These 38 stories, compiled from three previous collections and spanning more than 20 years, are about how women and young girls behave when traditional love doesn't appear or blows up in their faces.

Boylan's forte is to take the settings of everyday life, especially the middle-class domestic kind, and prick at them until gaping holes appear. In "A Nail on the Head," the title story from her first collection, Mirabel Hart's perfect little dinner party is savaged by her uncouth guests, a collection of bores her husband has assembled. The story is an escalating comedy of bad manners and callous malevolence.

Although "The Collected Stories" are not presented chronologically, the volume includes a page at the end of the book giving their publication sequence. So it is possible by doing a little re-shuffling to see how Boylan shifts her viewpoints over time.

Her first stories, from 1978-1983, reveal a young writer who is brilliant at unveiling life's comic ironies. "Appearances," her first published short story, is a beautiful, surprising study of secret love.

In "The Complete Angler" she twists the secret and the tone: A sexually challenged husband uses Izaak Walton's famous fishing book as a sex manual — with shocking results. Her vantage point for most of these early works is a little above the action, like a movie director tracking a scene.

In the stories from 1984-1989 (selected from "Concerning Virgins"), Boylan dives right into her characters' heads. There are stories of hysterical madness like the horrific "The Picture House," where two young sisters leave home on a quest to find the real cottage in their dying mother's bedtime stories. Or the more worldly, though equally disturbing tale of demented love, "Technical Difficulties and the Plague." Each is about a mind's projection of an alternative universe at odds with reality.

Reality takes a very funny turn in "A Model Daughter." Here, a woman hires a model to impersonate her fictitious, perfect daughter when her successful ex-husband (who has been paying her child support for years) comes to town. This story is so good — so alive with observations about mothers and daughters — you go right back and read it again.

Of course, there are clunkers in a collection of three decades: stories with trick endings, exercises of modern gothic which fade before you finish them. But then there is the next story and the pleasure returns as quickly as it left.

Two stories from the 1990s show Boylan's mature style. All her piercing ironies are still in place, but her themes have expanded in compassion, and her Irishness is more in evidence. Both stories are about outsiders.

In "Edna, Back From America," a penniless woman named June is mistaken for Edna, a married lady who mysteriously disappeared some years before. Welcomed into the home of one of Edna's friends, June tries to reason out her new circumstances:

"As she fell asleep in a room where everything was in matched shades of lavender, she wondered about Edna, what trick of personality she had to make herself so welcome to Ted and his wife while she, apparently with the same face, had no one."

Seven pages is all it takes for Boylan to lay out June's past, present and future.

"Thatcher's Britain" is even more remarkable, a complex story of hope and betrayal that reads like the shortest of novels.