The Comic-Grotesque Tradition

I. A Genre Without a Warning Label

The comic grotesque names an uncomfortable reading experience. Material that is legibly, even broadly, funny (a pratfall, a malapropism, a scene of farce) abruptly turns out to be describing cruelty, death, or degradation, and the text never says which was the real one. Flannery O’Connor built a career on this refusal. The grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” delivers her fussy, faintly ridiculous complaints about Georgia geography and her cat right up to the moment the Misfit’s men walk her family into the woods, and O’Connor never rings a bell to announce the shift.¹ J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World works the same maneuver from the other direction. A young man’s claim to have murdered his father is received by a whole Mayo village as delightful news, comedy built on top of a corpse that may or may not exist.² Both writers understood that the grotesque is more than comedy about dark things. It is comedy that gives no warning, in its tone, that darkness has arrived. The reader supplies the horror herself, usually a beat too late, and the guilty half-second of continued laughter is the point.

Mulhern’s comic-grotesque moments recall O’Connor’s American Gothic and, in their dialect and communal complicity, Synge’s Irish black comedy. The introduction to The Collected Stories and Poems of James Mulhern says that the volume’s Italian-American section looks “to Flannery O’Connor’s sense that grace arrives, when it arrives at all, dressed as violence or humiliation,” and that in these stories “comedy and menace share a kitchen table.”³ The question here is mechanical: how the laugh is made, which sentences switch the register, and what the reader is left holding once the switch has occurred. The answer leads from technique to people, because the comedy in this fiction is always built around the same figures. They are the women who hold families together by illegitimate means, and the men who supply the informal order that legitimate institutions do not.

II. The Faith Healer’s Parlor

“Useless Things” stages its turn inside a single scene. Agnella, Mrs. Muldoon, and young Molly visit a Boston storefront faith healer named Lady Jane. For most of its length the scene is pure farce, built from stock comic material. There is an invented illness (Agnella claims Molly has terminal leukemia to cut the line), a fraudulent mystic with “a fake British accent with a hint of Georgia twang,” and Agnella’s profane running commentary: “How ‘bout you make my tits perky like yours?”⁴ Molly performs a farce inside the farce, faking symptoms with real craft: “I managed to create a string of saliva that dropped like the thread of a spider’s web hanging off my chin.”⁴ Every visible signal argues for pure grift: the parlor beneath a printing company, the line of “desperadoes” around the corner, and the healer’s showgirl costuming, down to “white ballerina slippers with a flower pattern of red gemstones.” Mrs. Muldoon, who expected a wise elder, judges her at once “a tart that’s trying to make a few extra bucks before she goes to her other job in the Zone.”

The turn comes with no change of tone at all, and that is what makes it cruel. Still in the same twangy voice that has supplied every joke, Lady Jane tells the child:

“I hate to tell people things like this. But I see gruesome deaths in your future . . . You have the unlucky fortune of being someone who will either find dead people or be with them when they die, sometimes in violent situations. I guess you might say, ‘You’re an Angel of Death.’”

Then she “started giggling like a little girl.”⁴ Mulhern gives no cue, no change in sentence rhythm and no authorial aside, to distinguish this pronouncement from the healer’s earlier nonsense about perky breasts. Agnella’s “Ffangul’!” and Molly’s mouthed “Fuck you” on the way out keep the surface comic even as the family flees a prophecy the story will not let the reader dismiss. A reader who has met this narrator elsewhere, poisoning a roommate’s cookies with cocaine, already suspects the fraud has stumbled onto something true. The comedy has not stopped. It now carries a different kind of weight.

III. The Confidence Woman

Lady Jane belongs to a type as old as American literature. Melville gave it its founding text in 1857 with The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, in which a shape-shifting swindler works a Mississippi riverboat in whatever persona will best extract money or trust, and the novel never confirms which, if any, of his identities is real. Sinclair Lewis carried the type into the revival tent with Elmer Gantry in 1927, whose preacher’s simulated conviction is indistinguishable, to his congregations, from the real thing. Both books share a structural commitment: the confidence figure’s fraudulence is never fully separable from a kind of genuine gift.

“Myra Bocca” carries the type into a Wilton Manors New Age shop called “Sacred Ashes,” stocked with “incense sticks . . . tarot cards, essential oils, prayer flags.” Myra’s patter is assembled from the devices of stage comedy: running gags about names, bawdy non sequitur (“keep it in your pocket near your genital chakra. Does wonders for your vagina”), and self-deprecating physical comedy (“Just look at the size of this toosh . . . but in this town I’m outa luck”).⁵ The skeptical narrator dismantles the performance in real time. When Myra claims psychic insight into Gabe’s home state, he explains the trick at once: “It was the way that you pronounced ‘dear’ that clued me in. You dropped the ‘r.’” Every claimed perception has a mundane explanation in the same paragraph, which is how the genre is supposed to work. Yet Myra also seems to read something true. On their first meeting she asks, “Did someone die recently?” Molly deflects (“Lots of people experience death. That’s not psychic”) although her aunt has in fact just died. Her later reflection poses the question the story will not answer: “Maybe the black stones had nothing to do with grieving and she was making it all up, just a good reader of people, a con. In her business, you had to be.” Con artistry and perceptiveness need not be opposed skills.

Then the story turns Myra’s comic shamelessness into a real violation without changing key. She steals Molly’s credit card at dinner and charges “a television and some pornographic DVDs” to it.⁵ The theft is told in the same tone as every earlier joke. Molly’s outraged “The bitch stole my card” meets Gabe’s laughing “She’s up to her old tricks,” confirmed by Mr. Michaelis’s earlier warning that Myra is “a lying greedy bitch” who “’d sell her sister if she could.” The warning comes from a borrowed witness: Michaelis, the Greek coffee-shop owner, shares his name and trade with “The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the ash-heaps” in The Great Gatsby, the bystander at the death of Myrtle Wilson, whose name Myra’s nearly repeats. Every piece of foreshadowing was delivered as comedy, and comedy is what turns out to have been telling the truth. O’Connor’s grotesque often resolves into violence that exposes false grace. Here the result is a pettier, more contemporary crime, while the comic surface still carries accurate information.

The two women differ from Melville’s and Lewis’s figures in one respect: their stories never move toward unmasking. Nobody exposes Lady Jane; they simply flee her, and Myra is implicated in theft without an arrest scene. Both leave their stories still performing, fraud and apparent accuracy unresolved. The modern charlatan, in this fiction, need not be caught to be believed, and need not be believed to be, on occasion, right. Both are also shadow versions of the figure who recurs throughout Mulhern’s work, the grandmother. Molly notes that Myra’s eyes “reminded me a bit of my Nonna’s,” and Agnella sits through the Lady Jane scene as a skeptical chaperone (“Cut the crap!”). The professional healer is measured against an unlicensed, familial authority and found wanting. As the essay will show, that familial authority runs cons of its own.

IV. Sacred Meets Scatological

A second source of comedy is the collision of the sacred and the bodily, timed exactly. The most sustained set piece of this kind is the Margie sequence in “Keep Calm and Carry On.” It begins in devotional anxiety:

“I don’t know how I feel about all those miracles Father Tom was going on about.” . . . “He raised Lazarus from the dead,” Margie said. “And then He healed the deaf and dumb men. Oh, and the blind man, too.” She lifted her hand and accidently splashed my grandmother. . . . “Why aren’t there miracles today?”

Up to this point the scene reads as a genuine theological conversation between two working women wrestling with belief. Then the floor drops out:

“Sorry about that. Good thing they came up with adult diapers. I wear them all the time. It seems I always have to pee when I get nervous. If I sneeze or laugh. Even when I fart.” . . . “Honey, it’s a fact of life. Older people lose control of their bladders. I saw on TV that astronauts wear MAGs during liftoff and landing.” “What are MAGs?” “Maximum Absorbency Garments. Something to do with gravity makes the astronauts have to go. I have a whole different perspective of John Glenn.”

The comedy depends on speed and exact detail more than crudeness. The joke is the swerve from Lazarus to John Glenn’s bladder inside a paragraph, the acronym delivered with bureaucratic precision, and a “whole different perspective” on a national hero reached entirely through urinary sympathy. Rita’s attempt to restore dignity is itself a neat comic sentence: “We’re not here to talk about urination and the United States space program.” Its diplomatic gravity collides with what it is trying to dismiss. Margie completes the structure by refusing embarrassment altogether: “Urination. Rita, you make everything sound so intellectual. The way I figure is we all shit and pee. Nothin’ to be ashamed of.” The child narrator’s descriptions of her, “a smelly fat lady with a big white cat that hissed at everyone,” with cat hair “especially the ledge of her belly where Arnold sat,” are built from small details piling up, not a single insult. His aside, “I thought, why do fat people always wear sweaters?” would be mean in an adult’s mouth. In a child’s it reads as disarmingly true to how children think.

The scene is more than comic relief because of where it sits. It is the immediate prelude to the household’s most audacious crime, the theft of Margie’s jewelry from her own bedroom while she sits, trusting, in the next room. Mulhern places his broadest comedy directly against his darkest moral material. The reader’s guard is down, laughing at bladders and astronauts, at the very moment the narrative turns to a boy pocketing diamond earrings. The comedy is the mechanism by which the reader, like Margie, is disarmed.

V. Mock-Epic and the Slow Turn

“Assumptions” owes more to Synge’s village comedy than to O’Connor’s solitary menace. It opens on a whole family’s affectionate, collective cruelty toward a disfigured neighbor, told by a child who has picked up the family’s jokes without yet understanding their cruelty. Peggy Fleming is “the ‘homeliest damn woman’” the narrator’s grandfather “had ever seen,” and the card-table gossip about her marriage plays exactly as village gossip plays in Synge, delivered for entertainment between cigarettes, whiskey, and poker chips: “how in God’s name could Jim stand to look at that puss day in and day out?”⁶ The face itself receives a full set piece:

Her face was swollen and pasty, with broken capillaries that sloped down the sides of her nostrils, flooding the arid plain of her skin, like some dreary river and its tributaries eking over a delta of nasolabial folds to terminate in the red seas of two droopy cheeks. Spindly, awkward limbs stuck out of a round body, like you might see in a kindergartner’s rendering of a person.⁶

The passage applies the vocabulary of epic geography (rivers, tributaries, deltas, seas) to an aging woman’s broken capillaries. That mismatch of scale is the essence of mock-epic, the method Pope used in The Rape of the Lock and Fielding throughout Tom Jones. The kindergartner simile collapses the elevated diction back into childlike plainness in the next sentence, an adult’s retrospective irony bleeding through a child’s eye. Then the paragraph turns on a single beat: “like many ugly people, she had a heart of gold, and oh could she sing!” The comic description is not apologized for or withdrawn. It is recontextualized. By the story’s end, when Peggy dies and the narrator imagines her transfigured and “altogether beautiful,” the earlier grotesquerie has become poignant. The joke was never really about Peggy’s ugliness. It was about the distance between how a community describes a woman and what she is, and the comedy establishes the distance the story spends its remaining pages closing.

The turn here is slow. It does not arrive in a sentence but accumulates until the reader realizes that the comic material was describing, the whole time, a woman being destroyed by grief, drink, and poverty in full view of a family that found her entertaining. The narrator registers it from inside Peg’s own performance, as she sings “When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New” for a drunk grandmother’s amusement: “Peg was horrible, of course . . . but her pain was so real. I knew that she was dreaming . . . and I think it was then that the first throb of death’s glower entered my consciousness.”⁶ A scene that might stay comic from a distance becomes, through a child’s attention, an encounter with mortality. Mulhern leaves the comedy in place and asks the reader to keep both readings.

VI. Bathos as a Hinge

The quietest use of the comedy, and the easiest to miss, is as a hinge on which a scene turns from lightness to grief inside a single exchange. In “Arise and Go Now” the children relay Margie’s decades-old heartbreak as gossip:

“Suffers from a broken heart, but I wish she’d get over it. Arthur was the love of her life.” “Who?” “The guy that dumped her when she got fat.”

A life’s grief is compressed into one crude sentence, with the casual insensitivity children bring to adult tragedy. If the reader laughs, it is at the bluntness, not the pain, and the joke is gone almost at once. A page later the same Margie helps free a psychiatric patient, working her way down an institutional stairwell with real difficulty and real courage: “Margie moaned, easing her fat body as rapidly as she could down the stairs.” The vocabulary of her introduction now does double duty as evidence of loyalty and sacrifice. The joke about Arthur has not been forgotten. It has been recontextualized, as Peggy’s comic ugliness is recontextualized by her death.

The technique reaches its most concentrated form at the end of the diaper-and-astronaut sequence in “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Asked, almost as an afterthought, how she is doing, Margie answers: “I’m alive.” The two words land as deadpan understatement in the mode of the whole exchange. They also land as something darker: a woman in real physical and emotional decline describing her continued existence in the flattest terms available, just after a scene that has mined her body for laughs. Mulhern does not soften or explain the line. He lets the laugh catch in the throat, a move that recurs throughout his comic writing. The joke is real, the grief beneath it is real, and at the moment of greatest comic payoff the prose declines to say which it wants.

VII. The Matriarchs of Larceny

The jewelry theft is not an isolated crime, and the comedy cannot be understood apart from the women who commit the crimes. Before any interpretation, it is worth inventorying what Aiden’s grandmother Catherine actually does, because the accumulation is itself an argument. In “Arise and Go Now” she tells her wealthy friend Rita that Aiden has leukemia to solicit a check for medical expenses that do not exist. Aiden reports it with the flat affect of a child long used to her methods: “Nanna had taken me to Rita’s a few weeks earlier. She told her that I had leukemia and asked for help with the medical bills.” When he asks Rita why she paid, her answer gives the moral rule the cycle keeps coming back to: “Your grandmother is a lifelong friend. She needed money. I recognized her anxiety and wanted to help. . . . Of course not. Catherine lies. . . . But we all do. To others and to ourselves.” The victim is not deceived so much as complicit. Seeing through the fiction and paying anyway is, in this social world, itself an act of love.

In “Blindfolded” the fraud becomes theft, and the comedy becomes a heist. Catherine plans to steal a gold chalice believed to have curative powers so that her institutionalized daughter can drink from it. She is already rehearsing the justification: “I don’t know if I believe it, but I hope so. . . . I’m going to return it, sweetheart. We’re just borrowing the chalice to make your mother well again. I think God will understand.” The execution has the pleasure of a caper film: the whispered stage direction (“Fall,” she whispers, “Remember our plan”), the staged hysteria at the altar (“Dear Jesus, I don’t know how many more tribulations I can take”), and the innocent bystander toppled along the way (“I fell hard, shoving myself against the old guy. He toppled over as well”). Two weeks later grandmother and grandson return the chalice to a different church with a story, invented on the spot, about a penitent homeless thief. They earn applause from the congregation they are deceiving and leave under aliases that could serve as the cycle’s epigraph: “I’m Elaine, and this is my grandson Galahad.” When an old parishioner calls after them, “Yoo-hoo. Come back. We want to speak with you,” Catherine waves as she accelerates away: “Yoo-hoo,” my grandmother answered and waved. “We’ll be right over.” Then she mocks him: “Who says ‘yoo-hoo’ anymore? He must be demented.” The joke lives in the gap between the words spoken and the action performed, and the dated slang marks both character and era in four syllables.

“Keep Calm and Carry On” makes the crime domestic and casual. Aiden goes into Margie’s bedroom on the pretext of using the bathroom and returns with diamond earrings, an opal bracelet, two rings, and a gold necklace. Driving away, Catherine is so busy admiring the necklace that she runs a red light in front of a police officer, and she talks her way out of the ticket by weeping: “I know, officer. I was saying a prayer with my grandson. He gave me this gold cross and I got distracted. I’m very sorry.” The text marks those tears as theater (“Are you sad, Nanna?” “Don’t be silly. . . . That was an act.”) and then, on the same page, marks the next tears, over her dead husband and her institutionalized daughter, as unmistakably real: “This time my grandmother’s tears were real. They gushed like water from that rock in the Middle East.” A writer exposing Catherine as a fraud would not grant her a real breakdown one paragraph after exposing a performed one. A writer interested in simple redemption would not have shown the performance first, priming the reader to distrust the tears that follow. Mulhern keeps both readings alive in one scene. This woman manufactures grief when it serves her, and she is also crushed by grief she cannot manufacture, and there is no stable vantage from which to know, at any moment, which woman is speaking. That instability is not a flaw in the characterization. It is the characterization.

These are not ordinary lies of the kind Rita says “we all” tell. They are cons in the technical sense the term carries in American literary history: engineered performances with a mark, a story calibrated to the mark’s sympathies, a staged crisis, and an exit made before scrutiny can catch up. The leukemia story is fitted to a woman primed to respond to a sick child. The chalice theft is a two-act structure with a planted diversion. The jewelry theft depends on Margie’s particular blind spots, her loneliness, her trust, and her slowness on her feet. Each scheme is bespoke, and the fiction takes care to show the craft, down to the after-action check: “Perfect. She isn’t looking, is she?” The lineage is older and specifically feminine. It runs back, however loosely, to Defoe’s Moll Flanders, who commits an escalating catalogue of frauds while insisting, and half believing, in her own fundamental decency. In the Molly Bonamici fiction the debt is written into the family’s names: Molly is Moll, and her scheming grandmother Agnella’s married name, Janssen, comes from a husband who “was from Belgium” and carries one of the commonest surnames of Flanders. The family also inherits the comedy. Defoe’s governess disguises Moll as a man so that she can steal; Julien Janssen is found in his wife’s underwear and speeds off to be killed by a train, and his widow turns the death into a routine: “Never met an Italian crossdresser. Maybe it runs in Belgian families.” Agnella is the governess as well, the matriarch who stages the fall at the bank and then teaches the lesson with a slap: “You don’t get anything in this world the easy way.”

Moll works alone, for herself, in a world that has already failed her. Mulhern’s grandmothers work as the last functioning institution in households where every sanctioned one has failed the children in their care. This is the essay’s central claim. The con, in this fiction, is not used against the family’s interests. It is the family’s chief technology of survival. Aiden’s mother has been institutionalized for hearing voices the narrative suggests are real. His father has left for Arizona and a new woman, dismissing his son’s grief with “someday you’ll understand” and “fuck it.” The Church offers “mumbo-jumbo” healing rituals from a priest on whose breath the boy “smelled alcohol.” Against that backdrop, Catherine’s frauds look like a sensible, if illegal, way to get by. In a rare unguarded moment she names the economics: “I’m broke. Your grandfather left me with nothing and I gotta pay for your mother’s medical expenses.”

The fiction roots that adaptation in history. Catherine and her husband arrived in Boston as Irish immigrants into a hostile labor market: “When they first arrived, it was difficult to get good jobs. People hated the Irish. He dug graves during the day and hauled large bags of mail onto the trains at South Station during the night. She was a maid for the rich protestant Brahmans on Beacon Hill.” A woman excluded from legitimate channels of advancement for a lifetime becomes fluent in illegitimate ones. The community around her keeps an unspoken code that distinguishes small frauds committed by women without other resources, on behalf of children and the sick, from frauds committed for self-enrichment. Catherine’s own folk theology names the line: “Stealing it was only a venial sin, not a mortal one.” It is not doctrinally correct, but it does real interpretive work.

The fiction never settles the account. “I think God will understand” does three incompatible jobs, and the prose lets all three stand. It is sincere belief, from a devout woman who has spent a lifetime praying to Saint Anthony and crossing herself before crimes. It is rationalization, outsourcing judgment to a God she trusts to grade desperate mothers on a curve. And it is a confession disguised as reassurance, a woman talking herself into a crime by talking a child into believing it is not one. Aiden narrates all of it with almost total affective neutrality. When he writes of the second caper, “We ran out the door and across the street,” the diction is a boy recounting a game, not a felony. The effect is not to normalize the crime. It forces the reader to supply, unassisted, the ethical commentary the text withholds. Mulhern uses the same plain, procedural first person far more darkly for the predatory narrators of “Peppermint Candy” and “Mia Bambina,” which suggests that holding back judgment is central to his style.

VIII. The Comic Underworld

If the grandmothers are the household’s informal welfare system, its informal law is Mr. Scarfone. The American mafioso, from The Godfather to Goodfellas, is built for menace. Even at his most charming he carries the threat of violence, and a story that introduces him usually uses him, eventually, to deliver on it. Mulhern introduces Scarfone through exactly that expectation and then, scene by scene, violates it. Molly’s roommate Ashley, whose parents love The Godfather, anxiously asks whether Molly knows anyone in the Mafia. Molly’s answer is a small essay on how her family experiences the figure Ashley fears:

One of my Nonna’s friends, Mr. Scarfone, has ties to the Mafia. He’s involved in small-time things like gambling, money laundering, and drugs. Nothing major. He doesn’t smash horse heads onto bedposts . . . If you met Mr. Scarfone, you would like him. He seems like a nice old uncle. He tells stupid jokes, but he’s always smiling and kind.

Unlike most gangster narratives, the fiction never delivers the revelation that would correct her. Scarfone stays broadly as she describes him: comic, generous, mildly ridiculous, and loyal to Agnella’s family.

His menace is domesticated by placing him inside the family rituals that define belonging throughout Mulhern’s fiction. At Molly’s graduation party he gives a congratulatory toast, “pulling a paper from an inside pocket of his black jacket” with the nervousness of a man unused to public speaking, and Agnella needles him: “Look who’s smart now. You gotta read from a paper.” When Molly’s father jokes about “that shady character next to you,” “Mr. Scarfone laughed, brushing a hand under his chin and flicking it forward. Many of the guests chuckled.” The mock-threatening gesture is performed for comic effect because everyone present understands it as theater. Agnella discusses their romance in the same bawdy way she talks about everything she loves: “Oh, he’s just a good fuck . . . And you should see the size of his cazzone.” “The Voices That Would Not Be Tidied” reads that bawdiness as her way of showing trust. That Scarfone receives it confirms that he has been taken into the family and is treated like any other relative.

Before a reader can accept sanctuary from an illicit figure, the legitimate structures of a story’s world must first fail, and in the Molly Bonamici material they do. Grace here is a transaction: Agnella lies to Lady Jane to jump the healing line. The Church offers the widowed, alcoholic Mrs. Muldoon no pastoral comfort. Her search for the “Blessed Mother’s cure” on a public beach is a comic, embodied rehearsal of the Assumption, and it is followed not by any intervention but by a death the neighborhood reads as suicide. When Molly becomes a teacher herself, the school demands a performance of conformity while staying detached from the trauma of the people it serves. Into that gap steps the syndicate, acting less like outlaws than like people who know someone. Agnella notes with relief that “it’s a good thing Mr. Scarfone knows the chief of police” and can smooth over Molly’s behavior. The line treats a connection to organized crime and a connection to law enforcement as interchangeable resources, both reached through favors, not procedure. The family does not need the police to be honest. It needs Scarfone to know someone willing to look the other way, and the arrangement is treated with the same practicality as any other household resource.

Once, the menace shows. At the same party, moments after his comic toast, Scarfone puts his hands on Molly’s shoulders and says, “almost menacingly,” “If you ever need anything, and I mean anything . . . call me.” The adverb briefly reminds the reader what kind of man he may be before the scene returns to comedy. The fiction never cashes the implied violence. It cashes something smaller and worse. In “Mia Bambina,” Scarfone’s avuncular criminal reputation becomes part of the mechanism of Ashley’s murder, without his being shown to know it: “Obtaining cocaine from Mr. Scarfone, the mobster friend of my grandmother’s, was easy.” There is no scene, no negotiation, only the flat word “easy.” The arrangement turns genre expectation inside out. A mafioso who is rarely frightening becomes connected to a death because comedy has made him approachable.

The dissonance is left unresolved. When the state is indifferent and the church hollow, an illegal network becomes the one functioning guarantor of safety. Scarfone is a version of the chosen kinship Mulhern explores elsewhere, a protector selected because his rules, however illicit, are legible, nearby, and loyal. The flat tone lets the narrative give Agnella’s reliance on him the same emotional weight as a chore or a lesson plan. Stripped of Hollywood sensationalism and set among the shabby textures of working-class Boston, the syndicate becomes a piece of realism. When the sacraments fail to heal and the laws fail to protect, people find their protection where they can, even if it arrives as a quiet understanding with a neighbor who has the police chief’s ear.

IX. Agnella and the Children She Raises

Molly Bonamici brings both figures together in one woman. Agnella is Scarfone’s companion and a con artist in her own right, and the novel pushes the type further than the Aiden stories dare. Its narrator withholds the warmth that softens Aiden’s account. Where Aiden narrates Catherine’s schemes as a participant already enlisted, a boy who calls himself “Galahad” without apparent irony, Molly narrates Agnella’s manipulations with the clipped detachment of a much warier consciousness, even in scenes from her own childhood. Agnella fakes illness for advantage, coaches a minor through deception, and runs small domestic frauds so continuously that the teenage narrator has stopped being shocked by any of them. Molly’s flatter narration has already absorbed the criminality into ordinary weather.

The difference in narrators lets Mulhern test the same archetype from a new angle. With Aiden, a traumatized boy who loves his grandmother uncomplicatedly, the reader feels the moral vertigo of each scheme freshly. With Molly, an older girl who has begun privately to keep score, the reader feels its cost. The name adds a further dimension. A narrator named for the most famous confidence woman in the English novel, raised under the roof of a practiced confidence artist, invites the reader to see the family as an apprenticeship in a craft, handed down the way other families hand down a trade. Mulhern’s fiction seems more and more interested in what becomes of the children the confidence-woman matriarch raises: whether her moral flexibility is a protective inheritance or a debt they spend adulthood discharging. Aiden’s stories end before the question can be answered. Molly’s novel, ending with a solitary swim on the feast of her namesake saint, offers something closer to an answer, though not a wholly legible one.

The fiction holds two judgments of the same women in permanent tension: thief and savior, liar and the only reliable adult in the room, fraud and the last functioning institution in a household every legitimate one has abandoned. Catherine is never caught. The chalice caper succeeds, the jewelry theft goes undiscovered, and the leukemia lie secures its check. Nor does the fiction offer the comfort of plain condemnation, because the same women are, in the same pages, the reason a grieving boy has breakfast made for him and the reason an institutionalized mother is fought for and brought home. This refusal is not a failure of moral nerve. Its view is that love and fraud, given enough scarcity and enough failed institutions, are neighbors sharing a fence.

X. What the Refusal to Signal Costs

Across these stories the work withholds the customary genre signal, the tonal throat-clearing that tells a reader when to stop laughing. The choice has an ethical dimension. A writer who clearly separates comedy from tragedy protects the reader from complicity: laugh here, grieve there, and the two responses never touch. These stories withdraw that protection. The reader who laughed at Agnella’s joke about Lady Jane’s breasts is the same reader who absorbs, two sentences later, a prophecy of violent death delivered to a child. The reader charmed by Myra’s patter must reckon with having been charmed by a thief. The reader amused by card-table gossip about an ugly woman’s marriage must recognize, a few pages on, that the joke’s subject was dying of the grief it made light of. The reader who enjoyed the chalice caper has applauded, along with the congregation, a theft. The comic grotesque implicates its audience in the cruelty it depicts, and that is one way to read these stories beside Synge and O’Connor without placing them on the same plane.

What unifies the techniques (the malapropism, the mock-epic description, the heist choreography, the bathetic line) is that the comedy is never separable from the fiction’s larger argument about mercy. It works as a leveling device. It takes people the social world has already discounted, the alcoholic, the incontinent, the obese, the widowed, the lonely, the broke, and instead of asking the reader to pity them from above, it makes the reader laugh with the community that loves them, in their own idiom. Then the same comedy turns to reveal the dignity or grief the laughter had obscured. That is harder than comic relief, which relieves tension before returning to serious material unchanged, and harder than pathos, which presents grief without interruption. Mulhern’s characteristic move is to make the joke and the grief coextensive. Peggy’s grotesque introduction and her transfiguration are not two depictions of one woman separated by narrative distance. They are the same depiction read twice, once for the laugh and once for the ache the laugh had been carrying all along. That fusion at the level of the sentence distinguishes this comic sensibility from the ethnic urban comedy it otherwise resembles. It rewards a reader willing to slow down at exactly the moments the prose seems to invite the fastest laugh.

Notes

Works Quoted

Author’s NotesThe Voices That Would Not Be TidiedThe Confessor Archetype →