I. The Same Hand: Poetry and Fiction in the Work of James Mulhern
Sources: the poems of Crossings and the short story “Assumptions.”
James Mulhern writes in two forms that share a single set of materials: a grandmother’s kitchen, a grandfather’s silence, a body failing, a small mercy offered instead of an explanation. Reading the poems of Crossings alongside the short story “Assumptions” shows how the same imagination handles the same concerns differently depending on the demands of the form.
Both bodies of work return to grandmothers as the household’s central moral authority, often speaking in a register that mixes piety with plain talk. In “Assumptions,” the unnamed grandmother explains the Feast of the Assumption to her grandchildren, Beth and the narrator, with the same mixture of certainty and evasion she brings to everything else: “It’s a mystery, Bethie. Just one of those things.” The neighbor Peggy Fleming, called “Lovely Peggy” at the grandmother’s insistence, occupies the story’s comic and tragic centers at once — a woman shaped by alopecia, diabetes, and grief for her late husband, Jim. The poem “Catherine” performs a related maneuver in miniature: a grandmother eased into a warm bath while she remains, in her own mind, swimming decades and an ocean away.
The two forms diverge most clearly in their handling of time. “Assumptions” moves forward through a sequence of remembered scenes, accumulating incident until the narrator’s understanding of Peg deepens by accretion. The poems compress this same accretive method into a single stanza or image. “The Crosswalk” collapses an entire relationship with a father into one gesture recalled at a funeral: “Your hands on mine. / Proof that we had closeness for a moment.” Where the story has room to let a decline unfold scene by scene, the poem must locate an equivalent weight in a single image and trust the reader to supply the years around it.
What the comparison finally suggests is not that the poems are compressed stories or the story an expanded poem, but that both forms are governed by the same instinct: withhold the statement, trust the object, let the reader arrive at the feeling through what a hand touches or what an old woman remembers about a swim decades gone.
II. Epiphany and Its Withholding: James Joyce’s “Araby” and James Mulhern’s “Assumptions”
Source for Joyce: “Araby,” Dubliners (1914), public domain.
James Joyce’s “Araby” and James Mulhern’s “Assumptions” are separated by more than a century, a nation, and a form of Catholicism practiced very differently in Dublin and in an Irish-American household outside Boston. Both, however, use a first-person boy narrator looking back at a single formative period, and both build toward a moment in which religious language collides with disappointment rather than consolation.
Joyce’s unnamed narrator turns his infatuation with Mangan’s sister into something close to devotion, imagining that he bears “my chalice safely through a throng of foes.” The bazaar he finally reaches dissolves into overheard trivial flirtation, and the story ends with the narrator seeing himself “as a creature driven and derided by vanity,” his eyes “burned with anguish and anger.”
Mulhern’s narrator undergoes a related but gentler disillusionment, structured around an actual religious feast. Told that August 15th commemorates the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven, the boy and his sister, Beth, receive an explanation that satisfies nothing: “It’s a mystery, Bethie. Just one of those things.” Where Joyce’s narrator discovers his own vanity by contrast with a bazaar’s cheap glamour, Mulhern’s narrator discovers the limits of inherited piety by contrast with a more ordinary and forgivable childhood want — and finds, in the neighbor Peggy Fleming, a small, sustained act of care that complicates rather than resolves the story’s religious framing.
III. Grotesque Grace: Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and James Mulhern’s “Assumptions”
Source for O’Connor: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1953), still under copyright; quotations kept short.
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and James Mulhern’s “Assumptions” both locate a moment of unearned tenderness inside a story built from grotesque comedy. O’Connor’s grandmother is vain and self-regarding for most of the story; her moment of grace arrives only at gunpoint, when she reaches toward the escaped convict and says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”
Mulhern’s story locates its grotesque comedy in a gentler register but a related structure. Peggy Fleming is introduced through a childhood catalog of her physical difference — her alopecia, her toothlessness — even as the story reveals her grief for her late husband and her generosity toward the narrator, whom she defends and calls “sweetheart.” Where O’Connor compresses her grandmother’s grace into a single gesture at gunpoint, Mulhern distributes Peg’s goodness across many small, unglamorous scenes, so that her grace looks less like a sudden reversal than a quality obscured by comedy from the start.
IV. The Hand That Guides: Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and James Mulhern’s Poems
Source for Carver: “Cathedral,” in the collection Cathedral (1983), still under copyright; quotations limited to the story’s most widely cited closing lines.
Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and the poems of James Mulhern share a conviction that touch, not talk, is where real change happens. Carver’s narrator spends most of the story walled off by irony toward Robert, his wife’s blind friend; the turning point arrives when language fails and Robert proposes they draw a cathedral together, his hand resting over the narrator’s. “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper,” the narrator says, closing the story with its famous last words: “It’s really something.”
Mulhern’s poems locate the same conviction in scenes far removed from Carver’s living room, built on an identical mechanism: a hand placed over another hand at the exact moment words run out. “The Crosswalk” recalls a father teaching a son to knot a tie, then jumps years ahead to a funeral photograph of that same posture. “Moving Forward” makes the claim explicit: “touch a hand to show we care … All are acts that make us whole again.” Where Carver resolves the gap between two people through contact, Mulhern’s poem “Water” withholds that resolution, ending on a reaching hand and water still out of range — the same image of cupped hands used to measure a distance that does not close.