The Love Object was published by Jonathan Cape in 1968, and it confirmed what the novels had suggested: that O’Brien was as gifted a short story writer as she was a novelist, perhaps more so. The eight stories in the collection share the concerns of her longer fiction — Irish women, English men, the impossibility of love, the persistence of desire — but the shorter form suits O’Brien’s talents perfectly. Her prose is naturally lyric and compressed; the story form allows her to achieve the intensity of poetry without the dilution that novel-length narrative sometimes imposes.
The title story, “The Love Object,” is a masterpiece of the unrequited-love genre. A woman’s affair with a married man is told in a series of precisely observed scenes — a dinner, a drive, a hotel room — that trace the arc from infatuation through possession to abandonment. O’Brien’s achievement is to make the reader feel the woman’s pain without sentimentalizing it: the story is clear-eyed about the self-deception involved in loving someone who cannot love back, and it refuses the consolation of a happy ending or a triumphant independence.
“Irish Revel” sends a country girl to a party in a nearby town, where the gap between her expectations (glamour, excitement, romance) and the reality (drunkenness, coarseness, casual cruelty) produces a small, devastating revelation about the limits of her world. “Cords” examines a mother-son relationship with the same unflinching honesty that O’Brien brings to sexual love. “Paradise” takes a woman to a Mediterranean island where her lover’s indifference is set against the beauty of the landscape with excruciating irony.
The collection established O’Brien’s reputation as a short story writer and influenced a generation of Irish women writers — including Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, and Mary Costello — who inherited her territory: the emotional lives of women in a society that preferred to pretend women did not have emotional lives.
Collecting The Love Object
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1968): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- American first (Knopf): $20–$50
- Later editions: $5–$10