DOMESTIC RELATIONS, by Frank O'Connor (260 pp.; Knopf; $3.50), introduces an engaging child named Larry Delaney who wants to know where babies come from. His father says that they are dropped from airplanes, while his mother explains that "mummies had an engine in their tummies and daddies had a starting handle that made it work, and once it started it went on until it made a baby." But his schoolmates convinced Larry that his mother is all wrong. Una Dwyer giggles that everyone knows babies are bought from Nurse Daly, and one boy asserts that he himself floated down "on a snowflake, wearing a bright blue dress."
This episode from The Genius, one of the 15 short stories in Author O'Connor's new book, contains most of the ingredients that make him an accomplished reporter of the emotions: wry humor about family life, a nostalgia for childhood, an affectionately gentle treatment of the confusions between old and young. In The Duke's Children. O'Connor touches on the mythology of all the sensitive young who are convinced they must have sprung from nobler loins than those of their earthbound parents; in Fish for Friday, a man's race for the doctor to attend his pregnant wife is slowed to an alcoholic crawl by a succession of pubs and pals until the quest finally blurs into a blue forgetfulness; in A Bachelor's Story, crusty Archie Boland comes to the belated knowledge that his one narrow escape from matrimony was actually his last chance of happiness. Author O'Connor's stories are best read individually, for taken together they show a certain sameness of ideas, treatment, even phrasing. At his worst, O'Connor slips into the bathetic romanticism of the late Donn (The Woman of the Shee) Byrne; at his best, he writes like a James Joyce who has kissed the Blarney stone.