Mary Morrissy’s writing has always been characterised by both humanity and barbed wit, two qualities that do not always go hand in hand in fiction. Twenty-Twenty Vision, her new collection of interlinked stories, is no exception. These 18 stories view all manner of troubles and unravellings – tired marriages, adult children, old friendships, retirement – with a brackish yet benevolent gaze.
The majority of these stories are travelling under quick-fire, single-word titles (Repossession; Mortification; Weight). Together, they form a cleverly-made tapestry of middle-aged regret, romance, death and love. The survivors are those who have lived to tell the tale, yet are only now, as they reach late middle age and older, beginning to understand what hindsight is. The themes of friendships stretched and strained by the pandemic appears a number of times, as does the impact of illness on relationships. Morrissy is especially strong on female friendships, particularly those relationships that are capable of stretching through the decades like elastic, yet can shrink back in a single conversation.
Morrissy has a cast of recurring characters, such as Bernard Travers, who in Heartburn revisits an unlikely romantic encounter decades earlier with his German pen-pal’s mother. Abandoned by Greta, Bernard, a “soft pouchy boy”, ends up dancing with her mother. Experiences viewed with hindsight are the connective tissue of these stories: Bernard tells his friend Olivia that in the days after the dance, “We just went back to being who we had been”, yet that slight and unnamed encounter sustained his heart for his adult life.
Kiss of Life has shades of Lorrie Moore. At a dinner party, Marie’s friend Jane chokes. Marie’s husband jumps up and saves Jane, yet it is Jane’s husband who takes it upon himself to mansplain the Heimlich manoeuvre afterwards. “Here we go,” Marie thinks, and there are years’ worth of bored evenings stored up in those three scornful words.
I abandoned the running order in favour of a lucky dip; I preferred to encounter the recurring characters unexpectedly, as one does in life. With its in-jokes and cool-eyed outsider perspective, reading Twenty-Twenty Vision is like eavesdropping on a group of old friends on a night out. One of those gatherings where things may go unsaid for years, yet nothing is ever really off the table.
