As a film-maker, Dave Tynan has directed shorts including Rockmount (2014), Heartbreak (2017) and Down the Market (2023), as well as the feature film Dublin Oldschool (2018), adapted from Emmet Kirwan’s hit play of the same name. In Tynan’s debut short-story collection, We Used to Dance Here, Dublin emerges almost as a character of its own.
Set between 2016 and 2020, the 10 stories mostly foreground young millennials frustrated in their ambitions – whether career prospects, getting on the property ladder or building lasting relationships. “Being the first from his family to go to college was a source of pride at the kitchen table,” Tynan writes of one character, “but being the first to be unemployed after got less airplay.” The stories show both a grittier side of Dublin – from a late-night “sesh” to behind-the-scenes at the dog tracks – as well as middle-class characters struggling. In Baby’s First Plague, for example, Roísín is a graduate working in comms no longer able to afford a flat share who moves home during lockdown. Many of Tynan’s stories eschew a traditional narrative arc, suggesting that for this generation, there is no happy ending.
Tynan brilliantly captures romantic longing, including in men – a rarity in contemporary fiction. In Tourists, the opening story, a local man, Conor, falls in love with an American student escaping Trump’s first term with a semester abroad at Trinity. After their first night together, “he walked round town nicely dazed, the day scented with her”. In How Do You Know Them, which was first published in The Stinging Fly, two Irish expats meet briefly at a wedding back home. “He wanted to say something, something like how pupils were the closest things to galaxies we have, but thoughts tangled and everything sounded like shit dumb muck,” Tynan writes of the lovestruck young man. “Unable to say everything, he said nothing.” The pair’s paths never cross again despite living within a mile of each other in London and even sharing some shops – a painful missed connection.
The collection’s young working-class male characters recall the protagonist of Close to Home, by Michael Magee. Tynan’s stories effectively explore modern masculinity but also convincingly portray female characters. In Crispy Bits, Hannah starts dating someone new after a break-up: “The flutter and climb of their conversation and she knew she was reading too much into everything, but she liked this frisky agony.”
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While we get astutely observed scenes and moments of insight, there is little in the way of character development
In juxtaposition to the tenderness of the romantic threads, some of Tynan’s stories feature violence as a plot device – such as in Off Your Chest, which appeared in Winter Papers, about vengeance taken on an obnoxious talkshow host, or Dog Men, about the treatment of greyhounds. The denouement of Baby’s First Plague, in which she walks in on her parents in the act, feels quasi-violent.
Stagnation may well reflect the reality for this generation, but as readers, we’re primed to expect resolution (an ending, if not necessarily a happy one). BookTokers have coined the phrase “no plot, just vibes” to describe works by novelists such as Ottessa Moshfegh and Rachel Cusk. (Sally Rooney is also often cited, although her Victorian-inspired romances are plenty plotty.) Literary fiction favours interiority, of course: Virginia Woolf is considered the godmother of the subgenre. One cannot dine on vibes alone, however: in the absence of plot, successful stories tend to have strong characterisation.
Tynan does offer us access to his characters’ inner lives (“they’d left what they’d had with unspoken sketchy plans to do better for themselves,” he writes of a break-up). But while we get astutely observed scenes and moments of insight, there is little in the way of character development. Roísín is a self-confessed “resentaholic”, triggered by weddings and babies, and remains bitter. In the flush of the early days of dating, Hannah is resigned to caution, “exhausted by the hope” of her new love interest.
[ Small Bad Things by Shelley HastingsOpens in new window ]
We Used to Dance Here showcases Tynan’s talent – befitting of a film-maker – for dialogue and visual detail: a handbag, for example, is likened to “the yawning pouch of a pelican’s beak”. His societal observations are spot-on, but taken as a whole, the collection doesn’t quite reach the heights of, say, stories by Wendy Erskine or Louise Kennedy, which develop characters in the confines of a short space. “No one gets to the bottom of anyone else,” Conor’s brother counsels him. Maybe not, but we look to our fiction writers to try.
