The Rose Garden: Short Stories

Addictive tales from a rediscovered mid-century master. Or maybe the more appropriate word would be mistress, since The Rose Garden is crammed to the rafters with maids and their mistresses. Maeve Brennan, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, shows herself thoroughly in control of her fictive house in this posthumous reissue of stories from the 1950s through the '70s. Each is a witty, mean little miracle of lost chances and bruised egos. The first five stories are set in the town of Herbert's Retreat, an arty, expensive enclave on the Hudson, based on Sneden's Landing where Brennan lived for several years with her husband, New Yorker managing editor St. Clair McKelway. The Herbert's Retreat stories are linked entertainments, compulsively readable, and worthy of the adoration inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Basil and Josephine" stories. Like Fitzgerald, Brennan limns shattering loss and hilariously sends up middle-class pretentions--sometimes within the space of the same sentence. A pompous New York critic imposes his finicky will on the good wives of the community; a favorite son returns a broken man and finds that only the maids will dance with him; a bum passing through leaves his rather stinky mark.

Every character, above stairs and below, lives for the delight of recounting the disasters and drunks of the night before. The afternoon before the servants' annual dance, "jaded with talking about the dance, anxious now only to get on with it, willing even to have it past, so that they could start enjoying the discussion of it, most of the maids at Herbert's Retreat lay down on their beds for an unaccustomed ceremonial nap before getting dressed for the evening." The closed community and its inhabitants' transparent attempts to dominate each other recall E.F. Benson's utterly delightful Lucia series.

The Rose Garden is rounded out with several of Brennan's acclaimed stories of bereft Dublin life, a couple of experimental, stream-of-consciousness pieces, and, of all things, a handful of dog stories. Her forays into the interior life of her Labrador, Bluebell, might read as twee indulgences, except they're so rife with breathtaking, careful observation:

That was an unearthly morning--one mislaid at the beginning of the world and recovered in East Hampton under a high and massive sky of Mediterranean blue.... The wind was so new that it blew cold, in its first rush across the world, but the air was soft. The pheasant's head and body were almost buried in the powdery sand, but he had fallen with his wings wide open, and one of them slanted up to make a wedge of color in the air.

Such quiet, perfect sentences stud Maeve Brennan's stories. This is a book full of intelligent diversions, a book that makes a good, lasting sound. --Claire Dederer