The Dead

John Banville admits that talking about "The Dead," the long last story in James Joyce's Dubliners, intimidates him. For Irish writers it's the Alp they can't get over; Joyce, Yeats and Beckett loom like Easter Island statues, and Anne Enright says its last paragraph has led to more bad writing than any text in the world. Then he gets to work on Gabriel Conroy, self-important and insecure, married to Gretta from the west of Ireland, at the Misses Morkan's party on Usher's Island.

Banville reads the story, written when Joyce was 27, as a reconciliation with Dublin, and as Joyce discovering he's Irish as well as a Dubliner, through Nora Barnacle, the Connemara chambermaid who never read a word he wrote. The puzzle he can't solve is the "journey westward": toward a truer Ireland, or toward death? The snow asks the same question. His answer is that the story's greatness is its refusal to say, which is why we return to works of art.