Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition by Ann Owens Weekes (review)

Book Reviews273 Maybe I'm not the best person to review a book like this. In my opinion, any discussion of deconstruction and "metafiction" is frivolous. A waste of time. If, as Saltzman claims, language can't be trusted, if "all systems of organizing and selecting evidence are falsifications. . ." (30), then any meaningful discussion is impossible. The works of metafiction that Saltzman uses to illustrate his thesis are certainly clever, packed with puns and irony. They're like elaborate crossword puzzles, and Saltzman is very clever in the way he figures them out, but I think that art is much more important than crossword puzzles and cleverness. Let me give you an example. I was a soldier in Vietnam, and I became a monster. I enjoyed stalking human beings so I could kill them. That didn't bother me very much while I was there, because I expected to be killed myself. I was certain I would die in Vietnam. But I survived and came home, still a monster. I didn't see how I would ever be able to live among normal, decent people again. For a while I would go outside only when it was dark. I spent a lot of time loading and unloading my Colt Python .357 Magnum pistol, holding it to the light so I could look down the barrel and see the half-jacketed slug poised and waiting in the cylinder. Then one day, in the Portland, Oregon, public library, I came across some novels by a writer named Harry Crews. They were novels about terribly flawed, often grotesque characters who, in spite of their abnormalities and despair, courageously continued to look for beauty and meaning in their lives. Harry Crews, who I assumed was probably crazier and more tormented than even I was, through the characters he created, and the epiphanies they experienced, gave me shelter. I'm grateful. Art can save our lives. It can save our souls. The "contemporary American fiction" Saltzman deals in can, at best, serve as cocktail party small talk. KENT ANDERSON Boise State University ANN OWENS WEEKES. Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. 252 p. Ireland has long had a strong literary tradition, but critics have, in the past, centered on an almost entirely male canon. Ann Owens Weekes seeks to redress that imbalance by specifically focusing on a heritage of Irish women writers. She has selected nine ofthe finest writers from an abundant range ofliterature by Irish women in order to demonstrate an important and rich strand in "the larger kaleidoscope of Irish literature" (32). She writes in a lively, readable style that makes her book appropriate to the general reader as well as the scholar. Weekes begins by giving the reader a theoretical and feminist overview from which she argues the rest of her study. She employs the work of psychologist, Nancy Chodorow, and sociologist, Carol Gilligan, as well as 274Rocky Mountain Review literary theorists such as Nancy Miller and Elaine Showalter in her opening chapter to persuasively propose a feminist approach to Irish women writers. "In essence," she says, "women's experiences—the results oftheir early training and the perspectives this training engendered—will be different from men's and as such would seem to demand recording" (7). More specifically, Weekes emphasizes the personal and the domestic in this re-evaluation of writers, hitherto considered marginal, to place them in their legitimate place center stage in the history of Irish literature. Insightful though her readings are of the individual writers, this shift in perspective, leading to a validation of Irish women writers as a whole, constitutes Weekes' most valuable contribution to literary history. The second great strength ofher study is the seamless way in which Weekes weaves together the personal and the political as she explores how each woman's life informs her writing. Organized in chronological order, one chapter for each writer, her study opens with Maria Edgeworth, writing in the 1780s, and spans 200 years and nine writers, to end with such contemporary writers as Molly Keane and Jennifer Johnston. As well as those already mentioned, Weekes examines the lives and works of E. OE. Somerville...