The evolution of a style: Jean McGarry

About 20 years ago I reviewed Jean McGarry's first book, Airs of Providence, and was really moved by her stories and deeply impressed by her talent - and found the book obviously of particular interest to Rhode Islanders, and Jean precisely captured (skewered?) the insular world of Irish-Catholic Providence family life in the 50s. None had written about this before and Jean seemed to get it down just right. We later became friends, so I have never actually reviewed another one of her books, though I've read almost all of them. The latest is a new collection of stories, "Ocean State," from JHU press. I've read the first three, the section called aptly (and ironically?) Family Happiness. It's puzzled me for a long time why McGarry hasn't ever found the national readership she deserves, though she has published in some of the top magazines - but I guess there's no sense trying to figure out the permutations of reputation, how it's made and unmade. Those who've found her fiction, most of it published by JHU, are among the fortunate. In this latest collection, at least based on the first section, it's interesting to see how her style changes and develops since Airs of Providence - many books in between, some with R.I. settings, but this is the bookend, the only other to reference R.I. in its title. Yet setting seems far less important in Ocean State; the first three stories could take place in any of a # of cities. She's distilled her style down to focus intently on character and relationships - and these first three stories are so tight and condensed, each like a novel in miniature, with no time to fool around with extraneous detail. They're more mature than her earliest work and also more demanding, as we follow a whole life story in about a dozen pages. We'll see how the other stories work as we go along with Ocean State.