LIFE WITHOUT CHILDREN

In each of these 10 stories we enter a life and a marriage—either intact, fraying, or sundered—within which the various and frequently unexpected effects of the Covid-19 lockdown on Irish society are depicted with irresistible irreverence.

From the first story to the last, this instantly engaging chronicle of life during the pandemic lockdown in Ireland resonates with the voices of ordinary Dubliners who are enduring—and in an odd way relishing—the unprecedented social restrictions and upheaval that, in some cases, deliver hidden freedoms. “It was a decision,” a woman says of fleeing her suburban existence in "Gone." “Just, I hadn’t packed a bag...or thought about what I’d need to take....But when I heard the word. Lockdown. I was out of the house. Out of that life. I shut the door after me.” Alan in "Life Without Children," like most characters here, has reached the crisis age when the children are grown and gone, his parents are dead, and now he is “the oldest person he knew well,” a fact that “pleased him and kept him awake.” His wife leaves him, and he leaves his previous life to enter a more precarious one, as does each of the protagonists here, mostly by accident. A father walks the Dublin streets looking for the son he has driven away with his cruelty. A husband falls in love with his wife after decades of marriage only to face the terror of almost losing her to Covid-19. A son cruelly treated by his dying mother, ostracized by his family, and still drunk on the morning of the funeral he cannot attend tries to make sense of his kitchen, the contents of his fridge, the family pet: “He won’t be falling over again. He looked down at the dog, at his feet. —That right, Jim?” Humor of every shade, from near-slapstick to keen satire, prevents the collection’s moments of emotional insight from congealing into sentimentality. And Dublin itself, the broad streets and the even broader range of its natives’ speech—so pungent and quick—has rarely been so deftly captured.

A moving and quick-witted portrait of Dublin lives under lockdown.