A Silver Current

I. Repetition Misread as Limitation

There is a habit of mind, among readers first encountering a writer through a single book, of treating repetition as a limitation — of noting that a certain family keeps reappearing, that water keeps rising in the same places, that grief keeps arriving dressed in the same Boston triple-decker, and concluding that the writer has simply not moved on. This essay argues the opposite. Read across the full arc of James F. Mulhern’s published work — the novels Molly Bonamici (2016) and Give Them Unquiet Dreams (2019), the novella A Prayer for Home (2016), the story collections Assumptions and Other Stories and All We Ever Needed, the linked Aiden Glencar cycle gathered in The Weight of Small Mercies: Selected Stories, and the poems of Crossings — what looks at first like recurrence is in fact architecture.¹ Mulhern is not writing separate books that happen to share furniture. He is writing one continuous book, assembled over two decades, in which characters, symbols, and settings function less like reused props than like doctrine: each return is not a repetition of the same thing but, in the vocabulary the author himself uses, a new incarnation of a repeated truth.

This is the case for reading Mulhern’s catalog whole rather than title by title — as critics have long since learned to read Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Alice McDermott’s Irish Brooklyn: not as a shelf of related novels, but as a single sustained act of world-building in which the world being built is a moral and metaphysical one as much as a geographic one. The name for that world, borrowed from the emblem under which Mulhern publishes it, might as well be a silver current — the thin, unbroken line of water that runs beneath everything he writes, carrying the dead toward the living and the past into the present tense.

II. The Argument for Unity

Three claims underwrite this reading.

First, setting recurs with the specificity of return, not the vagueness of habit. West Roxbury, the Irish-Catholic parishes of Boston, the Italian-American blocks that produce Molly Bonamici, the Philadelphia interiors of the later stories — these are not interchangeable backdrops standing in generically for “working-class Northeastern Catholic life.” They are named, mapped, and inhabited with the granularity of a writer building a gazetteer he intends to use again. A reader who has spent time with Aiden Glencar’s West Roxbury recognizes its streets when they reappear, sometimes at a slant, in Assumptions and Other Stories and All We Ever Needed. The effect is cumulative rather than episodic: each book adds a layer of soil to ground already broken.

Second, character functions genealogically across books, not just within them. The Aiden Glencar cycle — running through Give Them Unquiet Dreams and into the linked stories of The Weight of Small Mercies — is the clearest case, but the principle extends outward. Mothers, grandmothers, and sons recur across ostensibly unconnected books in family shapes that rhyme: the clairvoyant or spiritually porous child; the matriarch who is both source of harm and source of grace; the absent or damaging father whose absence is itself a structuring presence. Molly Bonamici’s Italian-American register and Aiden Glencar’s Irish-Catholic one are, in this sense, dialects of the same underlying family grammar, not two unrelated case studies.

Third, and most importantly, symbol accretes meaning across the catalog rather than resetting with each book. Water is the paradigm case. It appears as violence in “A Bath,” where a domestic scene of washing curdles into an act of coercion and harm; it appears as baptismal renewal in Give Them Unquiet Dreams, where Aiden’s second sight is bound to water as the medium through which past and future leak into the present; it appears again, transposed into elegy, in the sea imagery of Crossings. A reader who has only read one of these encounters water as local symbolism, well handled. A reader who has read across the catalog encounters something closer to theology: water in Mulhern’s world is simultaneously the medium of harm and the medium of grace, and that doubleness — never resolved, never allegorized away — is the argument the whole catalog is making about suffering and renewal in Irish-Catholic life. The symbol does not repeat. It deepens.

III. Second Sight as Structural Principle

The most distinctive formal feature of Mulhern’s fiction is not a theme but a technique: the collapsing of chronological time through the device of second sight, most fully realized in Aiden Glencar’s clairvoyance in Give Them Unquiet Dreams. Critics have rightly traced this device to Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” and to the epiphanic method of Joyce’s “The Dead”² — the moment where an ordinary domestic scene opens suddenly onto the dead and the unresolved past. But it is worth being precise about what Mulhern does with the device that is not simply inherited.

In Joyce, epiphany is singular and terminal: Gabriel Conroy’s recognition at the end of “The Dead” closes the story even as it opens his consciousness. In Mulhern, second sight is not an ending but a narrative operating system. Past, present, and future are not sequential compartments the plot moves through; they are porous membranes the story can pass through at will, and does, repeatedly, across a single book and across the catalog as a whole. This is why the recurrence of characters and settings across separate books does not read as authorial economy but as a formal extension of the same principle that governs time within any single Mulhern narrative: nothing that has mattered once stays finished. The dead recur because the form insists that they must. Aiden’s gift is not a plot device layered onto realist fiction; it is the visible, thematized version of what the entire catalog is doing structurally every time an image, a family shape, or a stretch of water resurfaces three books later.

IV. Tradition and Position

Mulhern’s clearest inheritance runs through the Irish-American Catholic realist-mystic line: Yeats and Joyce behind him, Flannery O’Connor beside him in tonal method, Alice McDermott and Colm Tóibín among him as contemporary company.³ From O’Connor he takes the willingness to let comedy and grotesquerie sit uncomfortably close to spiritual seriousness, so that a scene can turn from darkly funny to devastating within a paragraph without the seam showing. From McDermott he shares the conviction that Irish-Catholic Boston domestic life is sufficient subject for the largest human questions — that grace and damage both happen at kitchen tables. From Tóibín he inherits an instinct for restraint, for the plot that moves through what is not said rather than what is.

What is genuinely his own, and what this catalog-wide reading is positioned to make the critical case for, is the fusion of that Irish-Catholic mystic realism with a distinctly American transcendentalist undercurrent — an Emersonian Oversoul relocated to a West Roxbury three-decker.⁴ Second sight, in Mulhern’s hands, is not merely inherited Celtic folk mysticism; it is folk mysticism crossed with the transcendentalist premise that all individual consciousness participates in one larger, permeable mind. That is a combination few other writers working in this tradition are currently making, and it is the argument for treating Mulhern’s body of work not as a series of well-made regional novels but as a sustained metaphysical project carried out in realist form.

V. The Case for the Collected Edition

None of this is fully visible from any single book. It becomes visible only at the scale of the collected catalog — which is precisely the argument for a Collected Works edition organized not as a chronological reissue but as a deliberately structured whole: stories and poems interleaved as thematic bridges, novels read against each other rather than in isolation, the Glencar cycle allowed to accumulate its full weight across volumes rather than being encountered piecemeal. Read this way, the recurring family shapes, the returning streets, the water that keeps rising and receding, stop looking like a writer revisiting old material. They start looking like what they are: the same current, running under every book, carrying everything Mulhern has written toward the same argument about grief, faith, and the porousness of the world — a silver current, continuous beneath the surface of each separate title, and visible as a single current only once the whole catalog is read as one book.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Quiet Cartographer of Irish-American Memory