Mixed Fiction

THE TRUSTING AND THE MAIMED, AND OTHER IRISH STORIES, by James Plunkett (220 pp.; Devin-Adair; $3), is the work of a brand-new Irish author, a Dublin trade-union official who writes excellent short stories on the side. When he wants to, as in a glitteringly ironic piece called The Wearin' of the Green, Jim Plunkett can mount as savage an attack on his country's new nationalist ruling class as the most delirious Liffeyside rabble-rouser could croak for. When in another mood, as in a spine-stiffening tale of men ratting and fighting against Britain's unforgotten Black and Tans, he can brew the strong, peat-smoked stuff of Irish patriotism. But most of these stories, dealing with humble Dubliners, plead nothing more special than the heartbreak of man's own making. A clerk breaks a leg running out on the girl he gets into trouble; his father's cast-off shoes hurt a schoolboy's heart much more than his feet; a tottering old watchman asks a Mass for the soul of a soldier he had killed as a youth. Together, such simple and tenderly told stories make a haunting picture of a Dublin not so very different, after 40 years, from the Dublin of Joyce's short stories.

No COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, by Warren Eyster (597 pp.; Random House; $4.95), is the slowest-starting melodrama since John Hersey covered umpteen pages before breaching The Wall. To fill his big picture of violence in a strike-torn Pennsylvania steel town, Novelist Warren Eyster starts 50 years back and paints all the ancestors as carefully as the main figures who finally dominate the canvas. Never relenting for so much as a chuckle, Novelist Eyster fastens his eye on personal as well as social change ("Irene had become a better person. She appeared to have learned that sacrifice was not necessarily a kindness, and that kindness was itself more important . . ."). One result is that men and women of inherited privilege, who change only slowly, are far less sharply drawn than his self-made types, who thrust through the community on the drive of their greed, hate and hope. When action finally and awesomely explodes, the upper-crusters crumble to bits. An old steelworker's sons, the power-vaunting Bart Mijack and his murderous brother, destroy their family, their union, their community and, in a last, lurid, mountain-top climax, their own lives. This is a big, dark, earnest book with all its wallop in the last pages.

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