Good Trouble

Joseph O’Neill

Fourth Estate, £12.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

Netherland, Joseph O’Neill’s magnificent breakthrough novel of 2008, was composed of two standard staples of fiction (a mysterious death, a marital breakdown), one truly original conceit (cricket in New York City), and page after page of intelligent, elegant prose. “Think fantastic” was one character’s motto. It might well have been his creator’s mantra.

O’Neill’s markedly uneven follow-up novel, The Dog (2014), swapped the Big Apple for Dubai and traded propulsive narrative flow for a series of momentum-killing tangents and digressions. Netherland shone a bold new light on the American Dream but The Dog offered only superficial stylistic dazzle.

Four years on and readers waiting to see what kind of novel O’Neill delivers next may be surprised or disappointed to learn he has opted for a collection of short stories – and old ones at that. All eleven stories which make up Good Trouble previously appeared in either anthologies or American publications such as Harper’s or The New Yorker.

It’s a strange, unanticipated move. Would it have hurt to include a couple of brand new tales? However, as the majority of stories are finely crafted, and some powerfully felt, it pays not to carp or query but simply to accept and relish O’Neill’s miniature tragicomic dramas.

The book’s opener, “Pardon Edward Snowden”, is one of several mordantly funny New York-set stories featuring a hapless male protagonist. Mark McCain is one of many poets asked to sign a petition in verse – a “poetition” – requesting Barack Obama to pardon Edward Snowden. Enraged not by the request but what he considers the misuse of poetry (“Why drag the poem into the muck?”), Mark grumbles to a fellow poet, scorns the Nobel Prize committee’s decision to anoint Bob Dylan, and vents his spleen in various “prose reflections”.

Throughout, O’Neill shrewdly highlights the plight of the struggling poet who is desperate to be heard and acknowledged, while simultaneously pricking their pretensions and underscoring their hypocrisies.

This isn’t the only story whose title name-checks a famous figure. In “The Death of Billy Joel”, Tom flies to Florida with three friends to celebrate his fortieth birthday. Labouring under the misapprehension that “The Piano Man” has played his last tune, Mark spares sporadic thoughts for “Billy” during his trip, recalling what he looked like (“a white blubbery fellow with a graying goatee”) and, in the shower, comparing him to the “withered nugget of soap” you finally throw away. Later, when realising that Billy is not dead but in fact has just got married to a woman half his age, Tom contemplates his looming watershed birthday and vows to make an effort “to soap himself with the shriveling world.”

The ageing process crops up again in “The Trusted Traveler”, in which a retired couple intent on making the most of their last years find themselves trying to cut away dead wood and “socially fire” an unwanted guest. Meanwhile in the longest story here, “The World of Cheese”, a woman who is shunned by her selfish, melodramatic, cheese-loving son, looks back on her life and her ex-husband’s cruelty and, abandoning “all sense of the real and the unreal”, decides to put her own needs first.

Two stories are informed by dead authors. “The Poltroon Husband” is a tale based on, or built from, some of Henry James’ unused ideas for a story or novel. “Promises, Promises” – at two pages more a sketch than a story – is penned in memory of David Foster Wallace. The former, about a cowardly husband too afraid to investigate a bump in the night, prioritises meandering thoughts over consequential deeds. The latter is an exercise in concision and, with its image of a solitary “seafarer” purposefully “swimming out toward the horizon”, a fitting tribute to a past master.

O’Neill’s stories – like all good stories – are not topped and tailed but open-ended. They are slices of life rather than self-contained stages of it. He subtly teases out foibles and weaknesses, hints at desperation and absurdity, and leaves his reader to form impressions and cast judgements. Do we root for men who make pledges then have a change of heart, or who are slow to grasp why they can’t obtain a character reference? Do we pity or laugh at characters who talk to geese at weddings or flounder in fertility clinics?

Only two tales fail to fully ignite. The rest show O’Neill playing to his considerable strengths and examining what makes us tick with humour, verve and sharp insight.