cover image Moses Supposes

Moses Supposes

Ellen Currie. Simon & Schuster, $19.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-671-65673-7

Any season that produces fiction from the far-from-prolific Currie ( Available Light ) is a plus, and these 12 short stories are funny, sad and brimming with life. But Currie's trademark--the witty, wicked, corrosively bitter dialogue of her Irish-American characters--is sometimes overwhelming when encountered in rat-a-tat-tat order. Whether a professor of mathematics or a precociously clever child, her characters are desperate to be loved, but they are either themselves sharp-tongued, malicious and rancorous, or the victims of others with those nasty traits. Some take out their anguish in marital bickering; others inflict guilt on their children; women often vent their frustration in fierce bouts of heavy housework. Currie can conjure a picture like a camera: ``She was a little, noisy, pretty girl; a sort of blue jay, heretical, put together by a reckless hand. He was peripheral--horribly tall, ferocious, and shy.'' She's almost without peer in reproducing the lilt and cadence of Irish speech overlaid by American vernacular. Three narratives stand out: ``Tib's Eve,'' in which a teenager about to be expelled from boarding school hears surprising news from a janitor who knew her mother; the title story, in which a character finds catharsis in confronting the reality of her marriage; and ``Exit Interview,'' in which an ad executive on the skids banters with a female assistant, disguising the terror lapping at his heart. If Currie's children are impossibly clever and her women often capricious and mean, her stories succeed in capturing the mutual destructiveness of human relationships and the small moments when understanding breaks through the stinging repartee and grants a glimmer of insight and peace. (May)