The Visitor, a previously unpublished novella written in the 1940s, was written by New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan who has already delivered a posthumous one-two with her biting collections The Springs of Affection and The Rose Garden.
In Brennan's stories, something quietly horrid has always just happened, or is just about to happen. In The Visitor, it seems to be both. Twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King returns to Dublin after living with her mother in Paris for the past six years. The two left behind Anastasia's father and his fierce old mother. It is to this scary granny Anastasia returns, now that her mother and father have died, but she is met by an implacable rage: Mrs. King has determined not to forgive Anastasia for deserting the family. Brennan sketches in this woman's nastiness in just a few lines. Typically, she writes around her character, rather than tackling her head on: "Mrs. King came into the room in silence. She sat down without speaking, arranging her long black skirt about her long-hidden, unimaginable knees, and examining the tea tray with a critical eye". It is clear that while Anastasia thinks she has come home to stay, she is a mere visitor, and an unwelcome one at that.
Few writers so delicately and cruelly parse their countrymen; Brennan wickedly lays bare the malicious repression of the Irish. Even as she satirises her sanctimonious people, she makes the reader aware that the pain they inflict and feel is real. All this witty psychologising is done with a minimum of characters and plot. The Visitor reads like an Elizabeth Bowen novel without all those words, or like Washington Square with humour. Consequently, The Visitor makes its departure all too quickly. --Claire Dederer