No Harm Done
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
ISBN-13: 9781943150076
Subjects: Fiction, general
Description: "A collection of fifteen stories, Jean McGarry's No Harm Done, depicts family life at its worst, best, and funniest, as if the author had conjoined the lunacy of Cold Comfort Farm with the bitter grievances of Dubliners. As the author writes in "Strong Boy," this might be " ... because every family, rich or poor, is roughage." The characters, gallant, goofy, gifted, and grim, include sickly mothers of a dozen children, boozy fathers with a gift of the gab, kids aspiring to be nuns and priests, or just to get out of town with a whole skin. A section is devoted to one marriage made in heaven: a Jewish psychoanalyst devoted to his ex-nun wife. Another set of stories reworks familiar fairy tales, setting them in the wild present. No Harm Done (whose title is Irish code for wishful thinking) concludes with a truce to the war between the sexes, and indeed a 'solution' to the tragicomedy that is marriage and family"--