A Mother

John Banville finds "A Mother" the most embarrassing story in James Joyce's Dubliners, and that's his way in. Mrs. Kearney, who once sat cool and polished among her accomplishments waiting to be married, and married a bootmaker, has secured her daughter Kathleen a contract for eight guineas across four concerts at the Ancient Concert Rooms. The concerts are a disaster. Banville explains the guinea (a pound plus a shilling, and the shilling matters) and follows her from the first concert to the moment she's handed four pounds and declares it four shillings short.

The turn is what Joyce never says: all the frustrations of her youth and her life bear in on this one evening, and she's cruel to a daughter who must be mortified. Banville borrows from "The Dead": there, snow is general over Ireland; here, embarrassment is general in the concert rooms. He ends on a kindness Joyce planted. Kathleen Kearney turns up again in "The Dead," so she survived her mother.