A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed

Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became.

Arriving home to Dublin, Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her grandmother

Aged 32, she secured a job at the New Yorker, contributing sardonic observations of city life as well as wry, melancholy short stories, part-fiction, part-memoir. The Visitor, her only novella, written in her late twenties when she was working as a journalist in Manhattan, remained unpublished in her lifetime. It tells the story of 22-year-old Anastasia King, who, after her mother’s death, returns from Paris to her grandmother’s house in Dublin, which had been her childhood home. Christopher Carduff, the editor of Brennan’s posthumously published works, describes it as a ‘ferocious tale’ of love longed for, ‘perverted and denied’. In 100-odd pages, it is utterly brilliant and icy – a story that leaves you chilled to the bone.

Most popular

Diana Hendry

I love Edinburgh. I’m not sure it loves me

Julie Burchill

Neil Gaiman and the misogyny of the geeks

Stephen Daisley

Nine reasons why Trump means business this time

Arriving home, Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be slowly and steadily spurned by her grandmother. Mrs King lives with her housekeeper, Kathryn; she visits her son’s grave daily and is unable to forgive Anastasia’s mother (and by extension Anastasia) for having run off to Paris. There is no comfort in Mrs King: she is ‘lonely, satisfied and closed’. A visitor in her own home, Anastasia feels a ‘deep shame’. Her grandmother’s rigid dislike is as remorseless as the dark that pervades the first third of the book on almost every page.

‘Can you recommend a country where tourists are still welcome?’

Mrs King is similar to other obsessive women who feature in Brennan’s stories – the priest’s mother in ‘An Attack of Hunger’; and Min, the twin sister, in ‘The Springs of Affection’, who feels her brother’s marriage to be an act of betrayal.