To characterise the tone of Maggie Armstrong’s debut Old Romantics, we might borrow a title from her contemporary Nicole Flattery and say that the twelve stories within this riotous collection demonstrate a writer who is bloodily determined to show us a good time. Following the travails of Margaret, a southside Dubliner, through her tumultuous twenties and thirties, the collection combines the precision and pizazz of the short story form with the interlinked heft of a novel. Finely balanced throughout is the tension between the domestic—matters of the heart, the womb, the stomach (Armstrong, a former restaurant critic, is wonderful on food)—and the creative, as Margaret reports from the frontlines of aspiring writerhood, battle-weary, riddled with bullets, but ploughing on regardless with her tiny white flag. Armstrong’s title says a lot about what lies inside. For all the modern overtones, these are stories that could be deemed Romantic in the classical literary sense: they are concerned with emotion, imagination, the experiences of the writer, the individual searching for their place in the wider world.
In Old Romantics, the drudge becomes the show. Pain is distilled into humour and absurdity. Here is a writer who likes to amuse, indulge, titillate and engage, inviting us to follow the chaos right from the opening paragraph of the opening story, ‘Number One’: ‘And if she had known where this would lead she would not, in her right mind, have left the office at that particular lunch hour.’ But the thing about Margaret is that even if she had known the trouble to come, she absolutely would have left the office. Every time, in every story, she leaves the building, runs straight out the door, and it is a testament to Armstrong’s skill that the reader willingly goes with her, an armchair tourist to a life in thrall to adventure, appetite and love.
The stories in Old Romantics are full of incident: they are escapades that take us through the loss of Margaret’s virginity and subsequent sexual awakening, on last-minute transatlantic trips with droll, monstrously unsuitable older men, or into the darkness of regrettable encounters with egotistical musicians. Her terrible taste in men becomes a kind of running joke, the backdrops fittingly seedy: squalid flats, cheap motels, the back seat of a car on an alcoholic early Dublin morning. The first half of the collection will be familiar to anyone who has lived through their twenties single: the wrong men, the most desirable kind. Where else to go from the best of intentions only down, down, down? Or as Margaret puts it in the story ‘Sparkle’: ‘Coming home I thought about the healthiest pursuits, of fruit and yoga. But it was a warm Friday night of unbearable potential and I wanted so much more than what was best for me.’
Many of these stories—about a character with the same name as the author—are told in the first person, which blurs the line between fiction and testimony in a way that mirrors the coquettish style of the writing. Bright, teasing interjections appear at various junctures: ‘All this happened some time ago… which I thought best to spare the reader’; ‘Yes, and this one’s a girl. This is fiction’. They offer little pops of reality, intended to keep us guessing, to maintain the gossipy, generous feel. Armstrong has previously said that the stories are on the whole fictional, some pilfered, others near to her heart, a number of them first published in Irish literary journals such as The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and Banshee, among others. Her interview with Aoife Barry in the Irish Times earlier this year includes a photo of the author with a deadpan, Beckettian caption I’m sure she enjoyed: ‘Maggie Armstrong is not the same person as Margaret, the character she created.’ Perhaps in Margaret the character there are shades of her creator, exaggerated, distorted versions of self, fictional, fantastic, wildly provocative and, above all, free to roam the page unbound. Perhaps not. To care about such things seems pointless in a collection this good: read the stories, appreciate the artistry. Reality is not, nor ever will be, this finely crafted.
Flights of fancy, or fantasy, are one of the keys to unlocking the secrets of this collection, its polished gems. Throughout the stories, the protagonist experiences extreme emotional shifts of register in everyday life; the insights and enlightenments lean into ambivalence, the prose is full of vibrant contradictory detail. In ‘The Dublin Marriage’, where Margaret turns a new flatmate into her husband, inside her own head, she tells us: ‘That morning I met Dan I started to imagine things, believing they were real. There was no threshold between the disparate realms, between the now and wished for, just a breezy opening into what was better, what was happiness, what was the very least you could expect from being born.’ Life may be difficult, it may be devastating, Armstrong seems to say, but all it takes to go from wonder to despair is a little imagination, some panache. And indeed the moments where imagination fails Margaret are among the most moving of the collection: no more stories, no more possibilities, no more hope.
The seven stories that make up the first half of Old Romantics deal with the more juvenile, but never trite, liaisons of youth. Margaret’s strength of feeling enlivens the material, reminding us that if history is a record of what happened at a particular point in time, then literature is a record of how it felt. Take the superb title story, where Margaret recounts a trip to New York (via an unplanned night in a north Dublin fishing village and a bus to Shannon airport) with her lover Walls, a man almost old enough to be her father, except that his frequent capricious outbursts seem more in line with a toddler. Armstrong brings the landscape of the city and a subsequent roadtrip vividly to life in depictions of alcohol, food and fury. At a famous deli on the Lower East Side, the pair eat sandwiches, ‘the tall, sliced meat toppled onto the ground in red piles to be plucked at by pigeons’. Later, ‘In Colonial Williamsburg, having a beer, [Walls] told me I had the face of a prawn.’ They fight, separate, reunite, copulate, argue, eat, drink, drink-drive, argue some more; they even survive a car crash, Thanatos in the extreme, and though Margaret the romantic comes home disillusioned and drained, Margaret the writer is satisfied, ‘invigorated, flattened, with stories to tell’.
Eight of the stories in the collection use a first person voice that creates a casual intimacy, a contract between writer and reader that nothing will be withheld. (I, for one, will never forget the phrase ‘inside the dewy tunnel’ in a bedroom scene.) Equally effective is Armstrong’s use of the third person in the remaining stories, including the two longest in the collection, ‘Trouble’ and ‘Trouble Again’, which account for over a third of the book and chart Margaret’s arduous transition into a long-term relationship and motherhood. Both stories are divided into titled sections such as ‘Prehistory’, ‘Six Weeks’, ‘Positive’, ‘Negative’, ‘Strike One’, ‘Strike Two’, that play with chronology in a way that reinforces the idea of testimony, of a writer getting down the memories as and when they envelop or assault her. Whether the perspective is in first, third, or the occasional switch into second, the excoriating honesty remains: ‘Terrible when there are things you’ve forgotten because you can’t even tell them to yourself.’ As does the humanity. With most of the stories taken up with romantic relationships, the lines on sibling and parental love land like shards: ‘All she wants in life is to impress her father and everything depends on his approval.’
The way Armstrong writes about love and infidelity recalls the short stories of Edna O’Brien, or, for a more contemporary comparison, the unflinching gaze and swagger of Niamh Campbell’s fiction. Into the mess, the wreck, into the abyss. Characteristic of all three writers is a willingness or need to hold up cherished ideals of happiness—holidays, engagements, births—and look for the underbelly, and likewise, to take moments of absolute despair—illness, separation, death—and try to find the light, or, at the very least, enlightenment, within. That the milieu in Old Romantics is affluent suburban Dublin doesn’t make the tragedies any less tragic or the comedy any less real. I haven’t laughed out loud so many times at a book in quite a while.
Here, for example, is Margaret losing her virginity to an impoverished cad in ‘Number One’: ‘She pushed away a can and a couple of DVDs with men all over the covers. She wouldn’t like to make too much of it afterwards, to overthink it, but the flinty glare of Tom Cruise was the last thing she saw before he bored into her, a snout digging in the placid earth.’ In a later story, ‘Baked Alaska’, she ponders why the ghastly Walls ‘insisted on referring to it as a round of sex’. In the middle of an another heated argument with her long-suffering fiancé Sergio Fantasia in ‘Trouble Again’, she plays a trump card: ‘If PREGNANT 1–2 weeks doesn’t beat mediator, then she’ll never win a fight.’ In ‘Maternity Benefit,’ in the throes of labour, she catches sight of herself in the ward bathroom: ‘A savage creature in the mirror. Hysteria patient. Electrocuted cat.’
Midway through this maternity story there is a shift to a section on Margaret’s writing and her efforts to get her stories published. Initially quite the jolt, the effect is to align the two: difficult, protracted births that bring great meaning to her life. In writing and in love, nothing has come easy to our beleaguered heroine and yet everything, as she might just say herself, is right within her grasp. Readers of Old Romantics will be swept up in the verve of Armstrong’s storytelling, but the deeper purpose of the humour, as with all good comedic writing, is that of connection, of recognition: this crazy thing called life, tell me you feel it too? The more we laugh, the closer we are to tears. Old Romantics is a collection big on feeling, on living, romanticism with a capital R, a striking debut of old-new stories by a writer of marked sensibility.