The Irish Are People

MORE STORIES (385 pp. -- Frank O'Connor -- Knopf ($5).

One great trouble with the great Irish writers is that they make Irishmen seem like nobody else at all. That, as James Joyce, Sean O'Casey and a dozen others have proved, is fine up to a point, but sooner or later even the most sympathetic reader gets tired of a literary chosen people. Short Story Writer Frank O'Connor has a nice way of making his people look, feel and sound like anyone else. Any reader might find himself saying: there but for lack of poteen, a certain uneasiness about sex and a wary relationship with the parish priest, go I.

More Stories is as good reading and as honest writing as short-story fans can hope to get, now that good short stories, and publishers willing to publish them, are as rare as blondes in Killarney. There are no writing tricks and no tricky characters; mostly Irish girls who wish their men knew more about love, mothers-in-law in the way, young men who are great lads in a barroom but boobs in the spooning parlor, priests who know the human score but have better sense than to add it up. In The Little Mother, a young girl learns one of the deepest truths about middle-class life: "Respectability, far from being a dull and quiet virtue, was like walking a tightrope." And in The Mad Lomasneys, an older man invites the fury of his girl by denying she knows anything about love. Says O'Connor: "At the age of eighteen to be told that there is anything you don't know about love is like a knife in your heart.'' More Stones slows down ordinary life--which could be anywhere --for a good look at it; the Irish accent is merely the pleasantly accidental result of O'Connor's being an Irishman.

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