Vladimir Dragan, “Healer and Sex Therapist.” In this broadly realist mode, O’Brien pays sympathetic attention to many different lives, from ordinary Irish villagers (the priest, the nun, the draper’s wife) to refugees, migrants, and displaced workers in London.īut her novel is also a piece of mythmaking, which begins like a tale from Irish folklore: one winter evening, a stranger arrives in town, “bearded and in a long dark coat and white gloves.” People later report “strange occurrences on that same winter evening dogs barking crazily, as if there was thunder, and the sound of the nightingale.” O’Brien can sound like the László Krasznahorkai of “The Melancholy of Resistance,” a lawless and fantastical novel about the arrival, in a small Hungarian town, of a semi-criminal band of circus hands. (The novel’s title comes from a commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Serbian siege, when thousands of red chairs, representing the victims, were arrayed in Sarajevo’s main street, including many hundreds of small ones for the children.) In Cloonoila, he begins a new life of subterfuge, as Dr.

It’s a realist novel-almost a historical novel-about a Bosnian Serb war criminal, modelled on Radovan Karadžić, who has escaped international detection and has arrived in Cloonoila, an obscure little Irish town. It mixes and reinvents inherited forms, blithely shifts from third-person to first-person narration, reproduces dreams and dramatic monologues. “The Little Red Chairs,” though thick with life, does indeed exhibit the kind of cussed freedom that one associates with longevity, and with long confidence in artistic practice. O’Brien is eighty-five years old, and praising this novel for its ambition, its daring vitality, its curiosity about the present age and about the lives of those displaced by its turbulence shouldn’t be mistaken for the backhanded compliment that all this is remarkable given the author’s advanced age. In much of that late work, there is a slightly thinned atmosphere, the prose a little less rich and hospitable than previously, the characters less full or persuasive, a general sense of dimmed surplus-but not in Edna O’Brien’s astonishing new novel, “The Little Red Chairs” (Little, Brown), her seventeenth.

People talk about “late style” in classical music, but what might “late style” in contemporary fiction look like? In late work by Muriel Spark, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, William Golding, and now Edna O’Brien, you can detect a certain impatience with formal or generic proprieties a wild, dark humor a fearlessness in assertion and argument a tonic haste in storytelling, so that the usual ground-clearing and pacing and evidentiary process gets accelerated or discarded altogether, as if it were (as it so often can be) mere narrative palaver that is stopping us from talking about what really matters. O’Brien’s astonishing new novel starts as pastoral comedy and steadily darkens.

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien