cover image A Lazy Eye: Stories

A Lazy Eye: Stories

Mary Morrissy. Scribner Book Company, $21 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-684-19668-8

A kleptomaniac gains a sense of mastery by destroying books she has stolen; a baby-sitter whose father has recently died takes revenge on her patronizing employers by pricking their baby's hip with a pin. These pent-up characters are found in ""Bookworm"" and ""A Curse,"" the opening and closing stories, respectively, of Morrissy's first collection. Like other characters here, they are lashing out against their constricted lives-in tales bristling with reversals, jealousies, blighted hopes, regrets and small humiliations. Morrissy, an Irish writer whose debut novel, Mother of Pearl, won a 1995 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, combines sensuous prose with startling imagery and disarming observations. Yet some of these tales never rise above the level of anecdote, such as ""Divided Attention,"" in which a woman plagued by voiceless, panting phone calls confesses to her tormentor that she herself has made similarly anonymous calls to her former lover, now married. Other stories are predictable: in ""Rosa,"" a young single mother, unfit for parenting, abandons her newborn infant on Christmas Eve in a department store creche. Still, in each of these ironic, quirky tales, Morrissy remains unflinchingly true to her dark vision of bewildered people whose lives are strewn with mute suffering. (July)