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Aside from depressing modern secular Irish characters engaged in adulterous sex, the abortion story which ends the volume is worthwhile reading.
Louise Kennedy’s anthology of short stories certainly entertains as casual reading; the stories also teach by illustrating the sexual depths and purposeless lives of Irish characters who seem bereft of their Catholic Faith.
The final story in the anthology, “Garland Sunday”, is a wonderful illustration of the power of post-abortion syndrome (PAS) experienced by a mother who cannot overcome the inherent guilt and anger following her choice to kill the unborn baby whom neither she nor her co-conspirator husband wanted.
Granted, we are all tired of abortion stories which follow Hemingway’s, Brautigan’s, or Irving’s templates, where the mother either merely considers abortion and may not decide to have one (Hemingway), or where the mother accedes to the killing and destroys the relationship with the father of the aborted child (Brautigan), or aborts the unborn baby and somehow justifies it as a more moral choice than giving the child up for adoption (Irving).
Both the mother and father of the aborted child in Kennedy’s story suffer PAS in the usual ways: Jerry, the husband, becomes angry with his wife, Orla, and the wife struggles to understand his anger. However, Kennedy’s story nuances the ordinary template of an abortion account; while it is the husband who tries to reconcile with his wife, showing his effort to overcome his anger by being willing to have sex with her, at story’s end the wife remains frozen in her hostility:
Does this mean we’re all right? he said.
It means we’re having sex, she said. Brisk, wordless sex. As if there were children in the house. (286; Kennedy does not use quotations for dialogue)
It’s time for Orla to attend a Rachel’s Vineyard session and for Jerry to focus on increasing the paternal love he has for their twin sons. Maybe he can teach his boys that real men protect women so that they don’t feel compelled to choose abortion, a practice which harms them, kills unborn babies, and alienates fathers who should care for both the women and the unborn.
Of course, while the other stories riddled with sodomization and adulterous scenes would not justify purchasing the book (the depictions are ordinary tiresome salacious sex scenes), borrowing the volume from a public library if only to read “Garland Sunday” would enable a student to write a splendid paper on PAS and the hate that a woman who chose abortion could bring into her marriage.