A Glassful of Letters [Paperback]

The contented life of an independent-minded Aer Lingus hostess?who stays in flight to avoid both exile and entrapment?contrasts with the bitter existences of men and women who live on the same street in Dublin. This meticulously observant second novel from Conlon (Stars in the Daytime) alternates between epistolary chapters and narratives in the first or third person. Conlon begins by introducing us to air hostess Helena, happy with her unromantic marriage and her one child, and her oppressed neighbor Connie, who groans under the weight of caring for three children and a boorish husband. When her life becomes overwhelmingly dismal, Connie begins writing to an Irish political prisoner, Senan. Her best friend, Fergal, footloose in America, at first disapproves, but the correspondence turns out to be a blessing in disguise. Conlon writes with sane, sober wit; her lucid prose is pithy without falling into epigrams. Although the alternation between present-tense letters and past-tense storytelling jars (and perhaps never quite pays for its showiness), her account of contemporary Ireland and the continuing Irish diaspora is sympathetic, well-measured and insightful.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Conlon's first novel is funny and hopeful, sometimes despairing, in the manner of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. It is the story of Dubliner Connie's struggle to find happiness among the demands of motherhood and the emptiness of an indifferent marriage. She loves her children but resents that marriage and motherhood have overwhelmed the other areas of her life. She finds she can only truly express herself to her best friend, Fergal, and when Fergal becomes unemployed and decides to move to New York, Connie is lost in loneliness--until she decides to correspond with a man imprisoned for his unwitting complicity in a bank robbery. Told by means of letters interwoven with the perceptive comments of Connie's next-door neighbor, the novel proceeds to describe Connie's slowly blossoming romance with imprisoned Sean and the consequences of this affair. Quietly passionate, the novel is romantic but no stock romance. Rather, Conlon unfolds the seemingly simple psyche of an ordinary married woman to display a rich and complex intellectual and emotional life. Bonnie Johnston

Friendship, fear, and exile inform this latest from Irish novelist and storywriter Conlon (Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour, not reviewed), a brilliant epistolary work suffusing a portrait of modern Dublin with the subtle wit of Clarissa. Helena, like most stewardesses, is good at observing things from a distance.''This story is not about me,'' she admits at the start. ``It's about my neighbour, Connie, and other neighbours, and what happened to her and us one year. She was brave.'' Connie, you see, is married to Desmond, a Dublin art teacher. She has several children whom she loves, but shes neither particularly happy with her lot nor desperate enough to change it. One great sorrow is her loss of her friend Fergal, whos moved to New York to find work as an architect. Fergal corresponds with Connie and Helena both, although Helena (accustomed to long periods on the road with Aer Lingus) is a much better gossipmeister, filling Fergal in on the Dublin scene. From Helena, for example, Fergal learns that Desmond's rather aloof father Bernard, a bibliophile and manager of the Waterford Glass factory, has begun corresponding with prisoners as a kind of charitable hobby. Connie, bored to death and inspired by her father-in-law's example, follows suit and begins to exchange letters with Senan, an IRA convict. Fergal learns, to his horror, that Connie has become infatuated with Senan and that Senan has actually been released from the slammer. What will become of Connie's marriage? Or her friendship with IRA opponent Fergal? For that matter, what will become of Ireland? And how can Helena and her husband Kevin be so blas about everything? To Fergal, it seems that his countrymen have gone daft, though in fact a larger process is at work in the society he left behind. A splendid reworking of the standard circle-of-friends saga, and a timely and fascinating glimpse of 1990s Ireland. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In `A Glassful of Letters' Conlon tackles emigration, working mothers, non-working mothers, Republican prisoners, the inhumanity of big business, adultery, and a lot more. Employing a dramatic narrative structure in which much of the story takes place in a series of letters, and set partly in Ireland, partly in New York, this is a very modern Irish novel, one which takes on the recent (and on-going) unprecedented self re-examination which has been going on in Ireland since the late 80's. Conlon skillfully interlinks the characters' stories to reflect the pressures-and pleasures-generated by rapidly changing social values. And at the heart of it all is the quiet bravery of one woman. "[Conlon's] account of contemporary Ireland and the continuing Irish diaspora is sympathetic, well-measured and insightful."-Publishers Weekly "Quietly passionate, t e novel is romantic but no stock romance. Rather, Conlon unfolds the seemingly simple psyche of an ordinary married woman to display a rich and complex intellectual and emotional life."-Booklist