The Love Object by Edna O'Brien, review The title of this collection (and also of her first story collection), The Love Object, points to the unabashed way the stories, almost always told from a female point of view, talk about men as objects of desire, luxuriating in male flesh, male looks, male clothing. In a way it blanks out the recipients of these fervid women's desire. The love object is not always a man; it might be a mother, a son, it might be Jesus; sometimes it is another woman: one well-known story, "Sister Imelda," is the bittersweet tale of a girl's crush on a young nun at her convent school. It ends with an observation that serves for much of the collection, in which the inner life is so richly told that the outer world seems subservient to it: "In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things." O'Brien's endings tend to have a dying fall. The lasting cadence is failure. Loneliness and exile are two of her greatest themes, aside from sex. In several stories an older, exiled woman returns to the Ireland of her youth and confronts the shrunken authority figures who once seemed so enormous. One of the most moving in this vein is "My Two Mothers," a reflection on her relationship with her own mother, which began cossetingly tight-knit, and deteriorated as the younger woman defined herself sexually. The story ends with a wish to meet her dead mother in a dream, "to begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting, and free of shame." O'Brien has been called a short-story master by male literary mavens (and friends) such as Philip Roth and Harold Bloom. She has that essential ability to condense time, a life, within a few pages. Other stories are more like sketches in time. It's fitting this collection opens with a party, the evocative Irish Revel, as parties are the archetypal O'Brien setting. One of her skills is to slip into a gaudy assortment of characters" minds. O'Brien, now in her eighties, had a late flowering into diversity. "Shovel Kings" remembers young Irishmen laying the gas pipes of London; "Black Flower" concerns the release from prison of a Republican fighter, and "Brother," a linguistic outburst, that reels with the inventiveness of its heroine's dialect and her murderous thoughts. Depending on one's taste, one could wish O'Brien did more of that than the affairs with powerful men conducted in London, Dublin, New York and by the Med. The various worlds of her longer fiction are here in microcosm. One character named Clarissa (like Mrs Dalloway, a patron saint of these stories) grasps towards something of a motto: "The reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give." The drama is often almost completely internal. But the claim rural Ireland has on her imagination is vital to these stories, many so clearly autobiographical and utilising the melodramatic fancies of childhood. There is an endless reel of vivid imagery, rampant and uninhibited, like red rhododendrons, a fire that smoulders on. The Love Object by Edna O'Brien 560pp, Faber & Faber, Telegraph special price £18 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £20)