If there are definitive themes to be found in Ethel Rohan’s new collection of stories, one is Ireland, and the other is men — how they arrive from over the hill, under the bridge, at the side of the road, and bring with them their world. They rise from the Irish countryside and the American city alike, right on cue, to ruin a life.

The first man we meet is the title story’s Mr. Doherty. Brought in by the parents of triplets to help with their peculiar daughter Ruth, who “claimed she couldn’t stand to be touched, not by anyone, not ever,” Doherty is immediately felt to be an invader. He has sweaty palms, grey eyes, obsequious manners, and on the first meeting with the triplets, “eyed” Ruth’s bare knee, “a tiny bald head.” Through the narration of the eldest triplet, Rohan asks us how comfortable we feel leaving such a man with three young girls. Another story, “At the Side of the Road,” features a much more obscene encounter with a man who “grabbed his crotch” at the young narrator as “his cracked tongue darted from his face.” Despite the variousness of these aggressions, it feels as if we’ve only run into the same man — and we will, throughout these stories, run into him again.

That is not to say that the only men Rohan writes are those prone to overt leering. More often than not, Rohan’s men arrive bearing gifts and affection, and they are as damaging to other men as they are to women. In “Before Storms Had Names,” Rory Deavitt, a self-conscious country boy, falls for Ashling Moore, a visitor from Dublin. Rory tries to flirt, in his awkward way, and lies in bed “fantasizing about Ashling in the room next to his, no more than ten hand lengths away.” Until the arrival of Peter — a man from Belfast with a Hillman Avenger, “a contagious grin and playful manner, even if he did seem confident that his every word would meet with only favor.” Peter finally sleeps with Ashling in earshot of Rory. The next day, Peter leaves, still brash and cocky, unaware of anything beyond his own body. Rohan deftly holds one man’s insecurity up beside the other’s, contrasting the brooding, shy farmer with the wolfish over-compensator, looking to charm his way through the countryside.

Rohan excels in the movement of characters, positioning them as efficiently as a stage manager. She knows at precisely which scene the Peters and the Dohertys of the world should enter, and she understands the limited space she is working with. This control ensures that her stories are never at a loss for momentum. In the first paragraph of “Everywhere She Went,” the narrator’s boyfriend mentions a co-worker named Hazel. In the second, we read “I have told him how Hazel’s blue eyes made me want to go skydiving,” and before we really know what’s happened, we have moved from a couple in a bar to a ten-year-old girl who has disappeared for good. The trouble with this approach, is that sometimes a story can feel sterilized, with a spareness that forecloses surprise or randomness. Descriptions become clunky: characters don’t laugh so much as they “dispatch” laughter or “issue” it in “bursts.” Cumulative sentences pile up until the description threatens to dissolve like candy floss in water:

He jumped backward, as though caught doing something he shouldn’t. Betty Something or Other entered, the woman sixtyish […] She squinted at Nancy and him, her hair the color of hay. He busied himself, pretending to browse the shelves. More customers came and went, casting sideways glances [. . .]

Perhaps this is why the best stories in the collection are those in which the control is relaxed. Stories like “Before Storms Had Names,” and “Blue Hot” take advantage of Rohan’s gift for lines that give off a little electricity, like “my racing heart seemed capable of grievous bodily harm.” In “Wilde,” language is dazzling and cocky, just like Oscar Wilde himself, who features as a perfectly wrought imaginary friend:

Wilde scribbled on a paper napkin. He was sizable, flabbing […] I couldn’t decide what stopped him from being all-out handsome. The hooded eyes, I posited. His hawkish air. It certainly wasn’t his flagrant lips, He demanded more napkins. So many napkins, a white wall of words rose between us. […] He wrote through three pens, until his right hand cramped, and next his left. I hadn’t known he was ambidextrous. Then he napped. He snored, farted.

This story introduces the second important theme of In the Event of Contact: the Irish dream of America. For Rohan, America exists as a kind of passage to adulthood, and the stories that deal with this emigration tend to be the most memorable. The narrator of “Wilde” moves around Dublin with the dead writer as though she needs a legitimate Irish anchor to keep her from floating off, back to life in Chicago. Like every character in the collection who has left for the US, she feels that Ireland is both too old and too new. “There was a time when there was a world of difference between Ireland and America,” the narrator writes, “but with each passing year, I saw more of the sameness creeping in.” In another story, another woman home from America reports, “In recent years Dad had taken to calling her ‘the Yank.’ Her whole life, people criticised her voice — too posh for her Northside, working-class neighbourhood when she was a girl; not Irish enough in New York City; and too American in Ireland. No matter where she was, she never sounded like she belonged.” Rohan captures the emigrant experience for what it is, a process of becoming an alien in two countries — and as glad as her characters might be that they left, they understand that everywhere has become, in some way, a separate world, in which there will still also be men.

+++

+