So whereabouts in New York do you live, I ask the writer Andrew Fox. “Second Avenue,” comes the reply. He pronounces “avenue” like a New Yorker born and bred: “avenoo”. But when he continues the sentence, I detect the accent of the post-downturn Irish emigrant; cautious, wary of bragging, wanting to keep the Big Apple low-key. “It’s a neighbourhood that’s between neighbourhoods,” he tells me. “Which is kind of what attracted us to it.”
A similarly double-edged, insider- outsider energy animates the stories in Fox's debut short-story collection, Over Our Heads. In Stag, two young Irishmen bump into each other in Manhattan, old animosities from across the Atlantic fizzing between them.
In The Navigator, a New York-based Irish father brings his teenage daughter on her first trip to Ireland, shattering the rose-tinted glasses of distance in the process.
How to Go Home offers a tongue-in-cheek "instruction manual", rendered in brittle staccato: "Open your eyes. Unclench your teeth. Relax your grip on the armrest. Take your iPod and your bad novel from the seat pocket in front of you . . ."
What there isn't, in Over Our Heads, is a story called "Over Our Heads". Is there a deep and meaningful reason for that? "Not really," says Fox. "The process of actually getting a title together took quite a while. The titles of the individual stories are mostly one word. Which is maybe a function of my minimalistic sensibility – but also, just me not being very good at titles."
Over our heads
Now that the book has been christened, he’s happy with the way it worked out. “ ‘Over our heads’ is a colloquial expression, so it’s close to the way that people generally speak, which was important to me in writing a lot of the stories. Many of them are in the first person and the idea of getting voices for the characters was important. But also there’s the sense of being overwhelmed by something.”
Fox, a native of Skerries in north Co Dublin, did his primary degree at University College Dublin, followed by an MPhil at Trinity College Dublin. Having studied in Boston, he is currently completing a PhD in New York.
“I started writing stories when I got to Trinity in about 2007,” he says. Does he have a typical starting point for a story? Does it begin with an image, a character? Or is it different every time?
“It’s probably a situation. Something about a situation will interest me, so I’ll begin to figure out a way to write about that. And then in the writing, something will suggest an ending. So the process is to write towards that.”
Take Two Fires, of example. What's the story behind that one? "I remember that I wrote it on the grass outside my university in Massachusetts, after a class." The setting for the piece is Chicago's O'Hare Airport, where Fox had found himself laid over for a few hours en route to the the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programmes. "I was as sick as a dog. I missed the whole conference. I was in bed the whole time," he recalls.
“I like the idea of starting a story with a fire. So, reading it, you’re waiting for the second fire.” The story features two colleagues on a cross-country work trip. “I quite like how it turned out,” says Fox. “It’s an odd one.
"There's a short story in the Denis Johnson collection Jesus' Son called The Two Men. And Johnson tells this story, and it's about one man. And then three or four stories later in the book, there's a story called The Other Man, which begins: 'Oh, but I never told you about the other guy . . .' I thought there was something a bit fun about that."
Saying definitive things
The short story is a wonderful form for readers – and for writers. But it’s a difficult form to talk about. Or would Fox agree?
“It is, because so much of what you’re trying for is openness. Some sort of formal conclusion on the one hand, but also something that doesn’t completely close off whatever resonance it has for the reader or in the world around it. To talk about the stories, you have to start saying definitive things – ‘this is a story about this’ – after spending so much time trying to make them about other things as well.
“I think, though, that the thing I like about writing in the form is precisely that they are hard to describe. And other people’s stories that I like the most are the ones that achieve that weird, right thing between a formal conclusiveness and an emotional or thematic ambiguity.”
Irish short-story writers are caught in another layer of double-bind. The fact that we’ve had so many masterclasses here in the craft in the past means that stories are recognised as a serious art form, and given the respect they deserve. For a young writer, on the other hand – Fox is 30 – the very quality of that tradition can be a bit of an albatross around the neck.
“You can think of it as an oppressive thing, a weight,” he says. “But it’s an interesting thing to have behind you when you’re learning, because there’s such a wealth of stuff that you can read – and steal from – when you’re starting out.
“There are certain things that are off-limits, though. I mean, you never write a story ending with snow.”
He stops. He has actually written a story that ended with snow, he confesses. But it's not included in Over Our Heads. "A lot of the work in this book is setting challenges for me as a writer," he says. "Try and do a short story well in the second person. After however long of writing 3,000-word short stories that you can send to magazines, try and write an 8,000-word short story."
The latter is Are You Still There?, the final story in the book. Its sad, wise narrator has clearly travelled a million miles from the raw boys of the opening stories, Pennies and Manhood. It will be fascinating to see where Andrew Fox's literary journey takes him next.
Over Our Heads by Andrew Fox is published by Penguin Books
HOT OFF THE PRESS: IRISH SHORT FICTION
If you don't like short stories, run away now. And run far. Kevin Barry's Impac win, followed by Colin Barrett's victory at the Guardian first book awards just before Christmas, have turned the Irish story into a hot literary property, with a fistful of major anthologies on the way.
First off the press – from New Island in March – is the Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction 2005-2015, edited by Dermot Bolger and Ciarán Carty. Faber's new collection, All Over Ireland, will follow in autumn and is edited by Deirdre Madden. Sinéad Gleeson is in charge of a third volume, also from New Island: Arrows in Flight: the Anthology of Irish Women Writers will be out in September.
There are plenty of solo collections to look forward to as well. Under the Rose by Julia O'Faolain, with an afterword looking back over her life's work, is due from Faber in June. In April, Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond will be published by Stinging Fly. Danielle McLaughlin's as-yet-untitled new book will follow later in the year.
And the new collection from the new editor of The Stinging Fly, Thomas Morris, will be out from Faber in August. It's called We Don't Know What We're Doing. Clearly, however, we do.
