'Past Habitual' a Bit Too Habitual

The title of Irish writer Alf MacLochlainn’s new short story collection, “Past Habitual,” refers to an infrequently referenced English verb tense. The habitual past, usually expressed through the words “would” or “used to,” describes an action that happened and continued to happen; it appears most often in narrations of nostalgia or memory. This term successfully encapsulates the collection’s tone and thematic focus. Saturated in longing and recollection, “Past Habitual” expresses its preoccupation with the past through a series of maneuvers as technical as its name: The book tries to capture expansive personal and political histories by utilizing a range of voices and language forms, many of which are unusually experimental. Most of these attempts at massive profundity and inventive genius fall flat, though. The stories are intriguing and emotional, but they consistently fail to reach an upper tier of meaning.

By Courtesy of The Dalkey Archive

The collection’s primary strength is its variety of well-developed narrative voices. Characters include a modern-day civil servant in search of a heraldry expert, a member of a boarding school marching band, and a reporter writing about Easter Week, 1916; while the speakers vary in age, time period, and connection to the country, they relate to one another through elements of Ireland’s politics, culture, or history.

Through tone and syntax, MacLochlainn manages to make every narrator an authentic-sounding person with distinctive internal patterns. The narrator of “Daisy Daisy” reveals himself to be sensitive and slightly inarticulate from his first sentence, saying, “I try to pretend to myself that I can keep them all at arm’s length, it has nothing to do with me, they are just old acquaintances, but it doesn’t really hold up.” This casual, conversational language remains consistent throughout the story, providing a meticulous and subtle outline of the speaker’s inner life. The radically different narrator of “Demolition of a gnome house” uses equally distinctive language. An intuitive child, he starts his narration with the simple statement, “There was always an envelope.” The envelope signifies money, and the rest of the story unfolds in a progression of similarly uninformed but perceptive statements appropriate to the character.

Aided by this narrator-specific language, many of the the stories develop a strong and appealing sense of intimacy. Small domestic moments—a first kiss, a first kill—become even more vivid and moving than their thundering historical backgrounds. In “Demolition of a gnome house,” the young narrator’s careful sense of duty and anxiety about his family’s monetary troubles becomes deeply touching; the narrator of “Why did I volunteer to kill the kittens” describes his admiration of an early girlfriend with equal sensitivity and detail.

Even so, the stories remain slightly inadequate, slightly bereft of an extra jolt of surprise or significance. The author seems to want to create stories with Joycean epiphanies, but the stories are slightly flat: “Daisy Daisy,” for one, describes a town’s reaction to a girl’s unplanned pregnancy, and while it captures the characters and culture with sufficient clarity, it conveys no lingering sense of importance, newness, or depth. The story attempts to introduce an additional thematic dimension by way of a symbol—feces as fertilizer—but fails to make the connection seem universalizing or especially intricate. Other stories make similar bids at meaning but end up mired in overstatement and melodrama: The otherwise-strong “Demolition of a gnome house” ends with a slightly absurd description of a boy’s collapsed mud castle. MacLochlainn writes, “The solid universe lies uncharitable before me and I stand up to the full height of a seven-year-old boy. Through the tears streaming from my eyes I can barely see the collapsing gnome-house as it falls in ruins in the dust about my feet.” The author tries to imbue a childhood event with tragic significance but veers too far towards the theatrical, turning a supposedly weighty and sorrowful moment into an unintentionally flimsy and comedic one.

Sometimes, the writing becomes stuck in an opposite trap. Aching with nostalgia, the author tends to slip into overly-detailed, plodding descriptions of processes: He goes into enormous detail about the construction of a weapon for a schoolboy’s chestnut fight, the architecture of a clock in a civil service building, and so on. The descriptions are possibly meant to add interest, local color, or thematic significance. Mostly, though, they bring the narrative pace to an absolute halt.

Other writing strategies pose similar problems. MacLochlainn toys endlessly with format, including quasi-poetic fragments from a paper shredder, a variety of fonts, and paragraphs titled “DOT no. 1.” Most bizarrely, he prefaces “The minstrel boy” with an onomatopoetic stream-of-consciousness. Lines range from “DOOM-bang FIFING PIPING” to “Out from the shadow of the stand BOOM BANG.” The section almost seems like a nod to the “Sirens” section of “Ulysses,” in which James Joyce precedes a section about music with an lyric version of an orchestra warming up. The technique, though, doesn’t work as well for MacLochlainn as it does for Joyce. As is true for most of the other format experiments, it proves to be inoffensive but unnecessary. “The minstrel boy” would lose nothing if the section were taken out, just as the fancy fonts add nothing to “Dot-and-carry-on.”

The collection, taken as a whole, evidences extensive literary knowledge and intense ambition. “Past Habitual” clearly involves emotion and research and time; the author cares deeply about his technique and his subject matter, and it shows. Still, the entire project might have been much more successful had MacLochlainn resigned himself to simpler goals. Clean style and thematic impact are undervalued here, and the result is an interesting but rather muddled product.

—Staff writer Charlotte L. R. Anrig can be reached at charlotte.anrig@thecrimson.com.