I. The First Verdict: Considerable Powers, Considerable Excess
The Kirkus review of Assumptions and Other Stories is worth quoting at length because it is unusually specific in both its praise and its reservations, and because its reservations identify, with real precision, tendencies that recur — and, this essay will argue, are substantially tamed — in Mulhern’s later work. The review opens by locating the collection’s chief strength in exactly the register this critical series has examined at length elsewhere: description of unglamorous, aging, or marginalized bodies rendered with startling literary ambition. “Mulhern demonstrates considerable powers of description, particularly when portraying his saddest characters: one woman, for example, has ‘broken capillaries that sloped down the sides of her nostrils’ and ‘spindly, awkward limbs [that] stuck out of a round body, like you might see in a kindergartner’s rendering of a person.’” This is, verifiably, the identical Peggy Fleming passage from “Assumptions” examined in detail in this critical series’ study of Mulhern’s comic technique — evidence that the author’s most distinctive stylistic signature, the mock-epic description of an unglamorous body, registered as a genuine strength to outside professional readers from the very earliest stage of his published career, and has remained a signature rather than an aberration across the decade since.
The same review identifies, with equal precision, what it takes to be the collection’s central weakness — a weakness this essay’s earlier study of the confidence-woman grandmother figure did not have occasion to address directly, because that essay drew primarily on the more mature, more disciplined treatment of the type in the later Aiden stories and in the revised, second edition of Molly Bonamici: “Another of the author’s strengths is in eliciting compassion for less-than-likable figures. Nonna, for example, sneers at others and cheerfully damages Molly’s moral compass, but a glimpse of her aging, bruised body connotes a life of hard living. Molly herself is harder to pin down, showing compassion in some stories and cold detachment in others.” The reviewer is identifying, without using this essay’s vocabulary, the exact same withheld-judgment technique this critical series has praised in the Aiden stories — and finding it, in this earlier iteration, less successfully calibrated: “harder to pin down” is a more ambivalent verdict than the productive ambiguity this series has located in the later work, suggesting a Molly whose oscillation between compassion and detachment registered, to at least one professional reader in 2017, as inconsistency of characterization rather than deliberate and sustained moral suspension.
The review’s harshest specific charge concerns structural discipline: “Some of the material is repeated with variations — one story, for example, appears again as part of a later, longer piece, and it’s debatable whether this repetition creates meaningful layers or simply takes up space. Mulhern also offers some distractingly over-the-top moments (including a few deaths that seem almost cartoonish).” This is a substantive craft criticism, not a matter of taste, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than explained away. The reviewer is registering exactly the recurrence-as-method that the author’s own later craft essays would come to describe, affirmatively, as his central compositional principle — “I gather images the way an old woman gathers glass on a beach. I keep the ones that hum” — and finding, in this earlier collection, that the principle had not yet been fully earned: the recurrence read, to this reader, as potentially unearned repetition rather than the deliberate architecture of return the author would later articulate as his governing aesthetic. The charge of “cartoonish” deaths, meanwhile, identifies a real tonal risk inherent in Mulhern’s comic method — the same mock-epic exaggeration and farcical plotting examined in this series’ study of his comedy can, when miscalibrated, tip from productive incongruity into caricature that undercuts rather than deepens pathos. The reviewer’s overall verdict — “a mostly enjoyable, if flawed, set of stories” — is neither dismissal nor endorsement; it is the kind of qualified, specific professional judgment that a serious critical account of an evolving body of work ought to reckon with rather than omit.
II. Molly Bonamici, First Edition: Deadpan Rewarded, Plot Structure Questioned
The Kirkus review of the original Molly Bonamici, similarly, offers praise calibrated to a specific, nameable technique — the deadpan first-person voice this critical series has elsewhere connected to the tradition of the plain, procedural criminal-confessional narrator descending from Nabokov and Highsmith — while registering a structural reservation. The review’s most quoted line singles out precisely this deadpan quality: “While she may have a cold exterior, her distinctiveness is an appealing quality and often amusing. Molly, for example, discussing a dead body, tells a store clerk: ‘[M]aggots are a good source of protein….Do you sell word processors?’” This is comedy of the driest possible register — grotesque subject matter (a corpse, maggots) delivered in the same flat retail-transaction cadence as a request for office supplies — and the review correctly identifies it as the character’s, and the novel’s, chief pleasure. But the same review’s closing structural judgment is unambiguous: “The novel, compiled at least in part of previously published short stories, reads like snippets — though the best ones — from a larger tale.” This is a specific complaint about architecture, not tone: episodic material, however individually strong, that has not yet cohered into the sustained, forward-driving momentum readers expect of a novel proper. The reviewer’s further note that the narrative “hits the occasional standstill, where Molly repeatedly ponders the same issues with Nonna or Gabe” reinforces the same charge — recursive, thematically repetitive material substituting, at moments, for structural development.
It is worth registering, without overclaiming a direct causal line an outside critic cannot verify, that the author’s own 2026 foreword to the Silver Current Press second edition of Molly Bonamici explicitly frames the book’s fundamental method in terms that engage this exact critical history: “I am publishing this new edition now because enough time, and enough other books, have passed that I can see clearly what I could only sense while writing it: that recurrence — what I have come to think of as a kind of resurrection — not invention, is the engine of most of what I make.” Whatever the compositional history of the revisions between the 2016 and 2026 editions, the fact that the author’s own retrospective account of the book directly addresses the very quality — recurrence, episodic structure built from previously separate material — that the original Kirkus review identified as a limitation, suggests at minimum that this was a live and recognized tension in the work’s reception, one the author has continued to think about rather than simply dismissed.
III. Give Them Unquiet Dreams: The Synthesis
By the time Kirkus Reviews assessed Give Them Unquiet Dreams in 2019 — awarding it the Kirkus star reserved for books of, in the publication’s own language, “exceptional merit,” and subsequently naming it one of the year’s Best Books — the review’s praise addresses, point for point, several of the specific reservations registered against the two earlier books, suggesting a genuine developmental arc rather than merely more favorable luck with a different reviewer. Where the Assumptions review had flagged unearned or unresolved repetition, the Unquiet Dreams review praises the novel’s use of “a liberal use of quotes and sayings ranging from Bible verses to Thoreau and Yeats, grounding the various players’ cultural context” — the identical technique of literary and scriptural allusion examined in this series’ study of dialect and inheritance, now read not as repetitive padding but as textural richness. Where the earlier reviews had located strength primarily in isolated description and voice, the 2019 review locates the novel’s “greatest heights” in synthesis: “it’s the rich characters who bring the novel to its greatest heights, as Aiden’s uncertainty, Martin’s protectiveness, their grandmother’s determination, and their mother’s wistfulness and grief make this a story about family and history and give the sense that everything and everyone are connected across time, whether or not those ties are immediately perceived.” This is, notably, a review praising exactly the kind of structural cohesion — multiple characters’ arcs converging into a unified sense of “everything and everyone… connected across time” — that the Molly Bonamici review had found the earlier novel still working toward rather than fully achieving.
The 2019 review’s closing formulation — “A luminous, beautifully told fairy tale grounded in history and elevated by spirit” — is worth reading against its own vocabulary: “grounded in history” answers, in effect, the earlier charge of “cartoonish” excess by locating the novel’s supernatural material within a specific, researched, historically legible Boston and its documented mid-century institutions (the psychiatric hospital, the immigrant labor market, the parish church) rather than in free-floating whimsy; “elevated by spirit” grants the supernatural material — second sight, ghostly visitation, inherited “gift” — the interpretive seriousness that the earlier reviews, more focused on comedy and grotesque description, had not had occasion to address at all. Read across all three documents in sequence, the Kirkus record traces something closer to an argument with itself, resolved by the third book: description without full structural cohesion (2016), voice without full narrative momentum (2016/2020), and finally, in the reviewer’s own account, all three elements — description, voice, structure — operating in concert.
IV. What the Record Does Not Resolve
An honest reception history should also register what these three professional assessments, taken together, leave unresolved, since a critical essay that simply narrates ascending praise risks reproducing the hagiographic flattening this essay opened by rejecting. The charge of occasional “over-the-top” or “cartoonish” excess registered against Assumptions and Other Stories is a real critical risk inherent in Mulhern’s comic method generally — the same mock-epic exaggeration, farcical heist-plotting, and grotesque physical description that this series’ study of his comedy praises as sophisticated when successfully calibrated remains, on the documentary evidence of at least one professional reader, capable of tipping into excess when the calibration slips. Nor did the 2020-dated Kirkus assessment of Molly Bonamici — evidently a later review cycle for the same or a revised edition — retract or substantially revise its 2016 structural reservation about episodic construction; the “snippets… from a larger tale” characterization stands as the fullest professional account of the novel’s structure the documentary record currently offers, a reservation the 2026 Silver Current Press second edition, not yet subject to fresh outside review at the time of this essay’s writing, will presumably be tested against anew.
V. Conclusion: The Uses of an Uneven Record
What this comparative reading of Mulhern’s early reception record offers, finally, is a corrective to any account of his development that treats his mature style as having arrived fully formed. The documentary evidence instead shows a writer whose most distinctive gifts — mock-epic physical description, deadpan criminal-adjacent narration, dense allusive texture, sympathy extended to unlikeable and larcenous matriarchs — were recognized by outside professional readers from his earliest published collection onward, and whose principal developmental achievement across the subsequent decade appears to have been less the acquisition of new techniques than the disciplining of existing ones: learning to make recurrence read as architecture rather than repetition, learning to let episodic material accumulate into sustained narrative momentum, learning to calibrate comic excess so that it deepens rather than undercuts the pathos beneath it. That this development can be traced, with real specificity, across three sets of contemporaneous professional judgments is itself a small argument for taking published critical reception seriously as literary-historical evidence — not as a verdict to be either worshipped or dismissed, but as a record, however partial, of how an author’s characteristic risks were seen, and increasingly rewarded, in real time.