Naming as Fate

I. Names as Instructions for Reading

Mulhern’s own introduction to All We Ever Needed states a governing principle explicitly, in language that a critic could easily mistake for throat-clearing but that in fact announces a deliberate method: “I take language to be a sacred inheritance and the act of naming to be a kind of devotion.”¹ Read against the actual character names in the corpus, this is not devotional abstraction — it is a working description of how Mulhern builds his people. Molly Bonamici, Aiden Glencar, Myra Bocca, and Peggy Fleming are not neutral labels attached to already-formed characters; each name imports a specific external reference — a novel, a historical death, a homophonic pun, an Olympic champion — that the character’s arc then confirms, ironizes, or literalizes. This essay reads Mulhern’s names as a deliberate allusive apparatus, a habit of “naming as devotion” that functions as a compressed form of foreshadowing available only to readers willing to hear the names as citations rather than sounds.

II. Molly Bonamici and the Ghost of Moll Flanders

Mulhern has stated directly that “Molly” derives from “Moll,” the heroine of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), whose character shaped his own protagonist. The allusion rewards attention precisely because it is understated rather than announced within the text itself — nothing in Molly Bonamici explicitly cites Defoe, yet the two Mollys share a structural situation that the name quietly insists the reader notice: both are women whose survival depends on a hard-won self-sufficiency acquired through deprivation, who narrate their own lives retrospectively and without excessive self-pity, and whose moral standing the reader is repeatedly asked to weigh against a society that has already failed them before they commit their own transgressions. Moll Flanders spends a criminal life justifying herself in a plain, unsentimental first-person voice remarkably close to adult Molly’s own retrospective narration of the toad-killing and the eventual poisoning in “Mia Bambina” — a killer who narrates her own crime with the same declarative calm she applies to pouring orange juice. The surname “Bonamici” — “good friends” in Italian — supplies the counter-current: a name that promises fellowship and warmth precisely for a character whose defining trait, per Aunt Bianca’s diagnosis, is that she “doesn’t feel things” and treats even murder as an act of family loyalty. The name is thus doubly ironic — Moll Flanders without Defoe’s explicit criminality announced up front, wrapped in a surname that means “good friends” and is worn by a woman capable of killing for family.

III. Myra Bocca and the Death That Repeats

The Molly Bonamici material extends its Fitzgerald inheritance (already documented in the corpus’s Dantean and modernist allusive layer) into a name that operates by sound rather than by explicit citation: “Myra Bocca” is a near-homophonic echo of Myrtle Wilson, the woman killed by a car in The Great Gatsby, struck down on a road after running toward a vehicle she mistakes for her lover’s. The echo is not decorative. Myra’s introduction to Molly comes freighted with automotive death from the outset of her arc — the reader meets a woman whose fate, once the name is heard correctly, is already spoken for — and the story delivers on the allusion’s promise: Myra dies after being struck, her body found beside the road, the black stone she gave Molly “for grieving” thrown by Molly herself toward the wreck in the story’s final gesture.² The etymology functions here as prophecy folded into sound: a reader who catches “Myra” as “Myrtle” mishears nothing and instead hears the plot in advance, an effect achievable only through naming, since no other element of the text announces the allusion directly. “Bocca” — Italian for “mouth” — completes the portrait: Myra is characterized almost entirely through speech, a compulsive talker who “dominated the conversation” and cannot stop supplying unsolicited detail about her own life,² so that her surname literalizes her single most defining trait before she has said a word.

IV. Peggy Fleming and the Cruelty of a Beautiful Name

“Assumptions” names its central figure after Peggy Fleming, the American figure skater who won Olympic gold in 1968 — a fact the story itself makes explicit rather than leaving implicit, with the narrator noting that he “always thought it a cruel irony that she had the same name as the graceful and beautiful skater.”³ This is Mulhern’s most direct authorial signal that names in his fiction are meant to be read allusively, since the story pauses its own action to gloss the joke rather than trusting the reader to catch it unassisted — a rare moment of the technique surfacing into visibility. The cruelty the narrator identifies is precise: Peg Fleming, “hairless as well, suffering from a mysterious childhood disease,” toothless, alcoholic, carries a name synonymous with grace, athleticism, and youthful beauty, and the gap between name and body is the story’s first characterization of her before a word of her biography is given.³ But the irony cuts a second way that the narrator does not name explicitly: the historical Peggy Fleming’s public identity was built on disciplined, controlled, beautiful movement under pressure, and Mulhern’s Peg, for all her physical wreckage, possesses an analogous discipline of voice — she can still sing, drunk and toothless, with enough residual control that the narrator remembers “the swelling sadness in her voice” decades later.³ The name does not simply mock; it identifies the one faculty — performed grace under difficult conditions — that survives intact beneath the physical ruin the story otherwise dwells on.

V. Aiden Glencar and the Absence of a Key

Not every name in the corpus yields to this method, and the exception is instructive. Aiden Glencar, the second-sighted narrator of Give Them Unquiet Dreams, carries no documented etymological or allusive rationale — no interview or paratext explains the choice, unlike Molly, Myra, or Peggy. What can be said is that “Glencar” is an actual Irish place-name (a glen and waterfall in County Sligo, in the heart of Yeats’s own home territory), which — whether or not Mulhern intended the specific echo — locates Aiden’s surname inside the same folkloric geography that supplies his family’s banshees, pookas, and inherited second sight. Where Molly, Myra, and Peggy are named after other characters or other people, Aiden is named, if the geographic reading holds, after a place: a boy whose defining trait is an inherited connection to a landscape and a family history he has never physically visited, carrying that landscape’s name as his own surname before he ever crosses the ocean to Achill Island. The absence of a confirmed source is itself worth noting critically: it marks a boundary between the corpus’s demonstrably allusive names and its merely evocative ones, and a responsible reading should not manufacture certainty the record does not support.

VI. Conclusion: The Character Arrives Already Written

Read together, these names suggest that for Mulhern, to christen a character is already to have decided a great deal about her — not as a mechanical determinism in which plot merely executes what a name promises, but as a compressed authorial commitment that the story then spends its length honoring, complicating, or literalizing. Molly Bonamici carries Defoe’s survivor and a surname that means “good friends” into a plot about loyalty curdled into murder. Myra Bocca carries Fitzgerald’s roadside death and a mouth-word surname into a story that kills her on a road after a novel’s worth of unstoppable talk. Peggy Fleming carries an Olympic champion’s grace into a body that has lost everything except the capacity to perform that grace one more time, drunk, in a basement, for an audience of one child. Mulhern’s own claim that “the act of naming” is “a kind of devotion” turns out to be exact rather than sentimental: these are not names chosen for euphony, but small, load-bearing citations, each one a promise the narrative keeps.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Pastiche and Undertow