love affairs, and disgraceful booksyet wants Eleanora with her when she dies and longs to be buried with her.

Each knows the other without and beyond words, and O’Brien consistently manages to capture that ineffable intimacy. A perfect example of their mutual knowledge and disappointment comes when Eleanora departs after a brief visit, claiming she must return to a conference, when, in fact, she seeks to resume an affair with a new lover. When she pledges to return in forty-eight hours, both she and her mother recognize the deception. “Then Dilly raises herself up and is out of bed, panting with a rapid breath as she embraces her daughter, holds her in a tight, clumsy, angry, desperate, loving, farewelling embrace.” In that one gesture the sum of their love and ambivalence is foregrounded.

Eleanora, in her role as writer, attempts to understand the complex bond and does so in one of her journal entries,Human begetting raw raw raw . . . . I was inside of you. Being banished. Wave after wave of it, hour after hour. Your blood, your bloodshed, and my last stab at living. Between us that blood feud, blood knot, blood memory. How can I know? I don’t know. I do know. It’s what we know before the words that is known.

Here she expresses all the intimacy, feelings of betrayal, and the connections that defy intellection. In one of her letters to her daughter, Dilly expresses the intimacy in far more direct terms, “remember love is all bull, the only true love is that between a mother and child. All them paintings Italians do with mothers holding their infants and angels above them . . . . can’t be for nothing.” When Eleanora asks the nurse what finally killed her mother, the answer is eloquent in its simplicity, “’She died from her heart, child,’ she said, her single caustic note.”

The novel’s form, the epistolary, emphasizes the extraordinary ties that link these two women. Here O’Brien allows the reader the most unvarnished, direct evidence of what each thinks and feels, and the letters run in all directions. Some of the first come from Dilly’s mother, Bridget, full of recrimination and thus foreshadow those she will later send to her own daughter. Quickly they shift to moving testimonies of the horrors of the Anglo-Irish conflict of 1919-1921, with ambushes, retributions, and killings, which eventually take Dilly’s brother, who has sided with the Irish revolutionaries.

The letters from lovers are another matter entirely. Gabriel, the love of Dilly’s life, sends only brief, perfunctory missives: “They were not love letters; if anything they were letters determined to dampen any notion of love.” After Dilly is tricked into believing that he has abandoned her, she manages one last contact, but that letter is another model of restraint and bluntness: “I am not in the place I was anymore,” and after that is silence for the rest of her life. The notes from Eleanora’s husband are downright cruel and designed to wound, as he pours out his resentments, jealousies, and insecurities.

Dilly’s messages are marvelous models of banality interrupted by eloquence, profound affection, and genuine confession. She often fills her notes with the commonplace, only to turn instantly to her overriding love, a gesture that is at once hilarious and affecting, “The electric blanket you gave me conked out and they said in the factory it wanted a new control. In case I should pass away we will get the mapping done for the kitchen garden when you are here. Somehow I have been thinking of you every moment.” Some notes are full of lyricism and poetry, and others offer dreams and visions of a woman who sees far into the heart of existence. Her last message, however, is positively wrenching:There are many parts of my life I would not want to relive but I must say I had good times of it in Brooklyn. New York I only set foot in once and on a very unhappy mission, searching for a friend who wasn’t even there at the time. How I long for us to have a big chat one day as there are things I’d like to tell you. You have not forgotten us or our creature comforts but there is something that bugs me. It hurts the way you make yourself so aloof, always running away from us, running running to where. Are we lepers or what . . .

As the last quote makes evident, even at the approach of death, Dilly thinks of her American sojourn, the pleasure of courtship at Coney Island, and the disappointment of receiving Gabriel’s last, curt message on her one return to America. Her letters often invoke a relationship between mother and child that existed somewhere in the past, and her hope is that they can one day reclaim that affinity. The novel’s epigraph, from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun (1951), “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” operates on two levels. As a profoundly Irish writer, O’Brien is intimately familiar with the cultural tendency to retain and nourish the past. Celtic bards were the repositories of a tribe’s history, and the Irish are a people who have always exhibited an extraordinary reverence for the past. On a more personal level, though, the profound relationship of mother and daughter is never over, never complete. The past is always the present, and the ties that bind can never be undone. As Dilly approaches death, her past is immediate and as compelling as the present. In a last thought of her mother, Eleanora reveals the hold the past has on the two of them as she massages her mother’s neck, “searching out the knots and the crick, then along the nape, under her swallow, holding the bowl of her head in my hands, entreating her to let go, to let go of her troubles and she replying, ’If only we could, if only we could.’”

Much of the novel may remind readers of The Country Girls Trilogy (1960-1964) and of details from O’Brien’s well-publicized personal life. While the novel does indeed revisit earlier novels and invite biographical comparisons, it is more importantly an original portrait of longing, devotion, and sadness. As in so many of her works, she captures her unique relationship with her homeland, with the Irish desire for and sorrow over exile and with power of the past forever to shape and define existence. As always, it is a work distinguished by O’Brien’s unique voice and masterful style.