American Fiction, Short Story Collections (Single Author), Irish Americans - Fiction & Literature

The End of the Class War

Name: The End of the Class War
Author: Catherine Brady
ISBN: 9780934971669

by Catherine Brady

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Overview

...the author succeeds in breathing new life into well-worn archetypes.-Jennifer Berman, The New York Times Book Review

"In the noisy, crowded kitchens of [Catherine Brady's] working-class Irish American households, proud, strong willed articulate women contend with the challenges of loneliness, poverty, and disabling illness. Blessed--and cursed-- with a predisposition toward caring for others, Ms. Brady's heroines have an instinctive compassion for the fragile and the needy. They draw strength from their faith and their families to resist despair"-Jennifer C. Cornell

An excerpt from "Home Movies"

"The little girls tumble on the lawn in their pajamas, their damp hair curled in ringlets their mother has carefully shaped around her finger before she let them out into the warm summer night. The girls do cartwheels, somersaults, wobbly headstands. They're a oneness, a jumble of seal-smooth, perfect bodies, sleek bellies bared when they reach their arms, lovely arched feet, firm rumps that could be cupped in two hands. Hiding from the camera, their mother crouches beside their aunt and uncle in their lawn chairs, plump and squat, her body an impossible origin for these lithe creatures."

Synopsis

As stark and moving as Angela's Ashes, Brady's collection is a poignant exploration of working class Irish American life.

NY Times Book Review - Jennifer Berman

[T]he author succeeds in breathing new life into well-worn archetypes.

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Editorials

Jennifer Berman

[T]he author succeeds in breathing new life into well-worn archetypes.
— NY Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The 14 interlinked stories in this moving collection are beautifully crafted snapshots of Irish immigrants to American cities (Chicago, San Francisco) in 1950. "It's no mercy... seeing into the insides of things, into the secret ways by which the bones absorb shock and mend themselves... " but Brady does it with compassion and joy. Her short fictions capture critical moments in the lives of the working-class women who absorb shocks, mend, go on. The opening tale introduces "The Daley Girls," five sisters; their hard-working, hard-drinking, bewildered, enraged father, Joe; and their trapped, overworked, brutalized and heroic mother, Maureen. "Don't Walk," portrays Nora, the useful maiden aunt, who gave up her Ph.D., the engine of her escape, to help her mother care for her disabled father as she now helps her sister Maureen care for her children. In "Rumpelstiltskin," the damaged, crippled vets in the VA hospital long for the freedom of death, while in "Lives of the Saints," Danny, age seven, fights against the cruel restraints of spina bifida while his mother takes on other hopeless causes, knowing "suffering brings us closer to God." The overwhelming need to escape despair may be depressing, but these stories light the family's churning characters in full motion--they are jubilant, indomitable. Later, in "Home Movies" and "Driving," the Daley girls have grown up, following the current into middle-class America, no longer subject to the daily humiliations of the working-class poor. The final story presents three generations of women closely perceived, as they battle the cycle of life that is particularly female, burdened, courageous, kind and human. Agent, Jandy Nelson, Manus & Associates Literary Agency. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.