Lizzie & Other Stories: Story Synopsis

     These stories, when collected together, convey more than an uncomplicated and loving impression of abandoned characters, most of whose social lives consisted of drinking with other abandoned characters, at O'Briens tavern in depression-era Buffalo before the wide eyes of the owners' son Billy.
     The frames of this thin volume are several newspaper-style death notices placed at the beginning of several stories. Against that arid prose, Breen's reserved style blossoms.
     Beginning, in Lizzie, with a long remembrance of his mother, Billy's affection, not diminished by the years, is all there. But, as in the other stories, another complex and darker side of her character is developed and co-exists with her near angelic, self-sacrificing side. Coming unexpectedly into money, Lizzie, always clever, does not conceal the fact of the gift from her husband- that would be wrong- but she does conceal the extent of the gift- that deception she deems prudent. In writing her this way, Breen brings to life a real person for the reader to admire and evaluate.
     In Waiting for the Tap, we are introduced to a loser, made for a moment into a winner by the kindness of a bartender. We are reminded that life rarely deals spectacular successes or failures to us. We are left to cope, as best we can, with long stretches of loneliness and exclusion, interrupted by brief moments of belonging.
     In The Holy Secret, the mysteries of Luke 16:1-9, the parable in which Jesus seems to be advocating salvation by currying the favor of the corrupt, is explored. This passage has baffled scholars and sermonists alike, and this story, anti-Augustinian in its simplicity, advances our understanding of the parable by applying it to the conflicts between and among ordinary people.
     The Haircut is, for the most part, a catechumenical tale of a young boy avoiding, until the last moment, the haircut he'll need to make his First Communion. Breen then takes us into the obscene, jarringly real world of the barbershop and the story turns to an jeopardization of the boys innocence, until, of all people, the barber, an unlikely catechist, intervenes.
     Pig Iron O'Mara, a very bad drunk, gets his when he is tossed through The Improvement by Lizzie's normally pacific husband Michael, after O'Mara insults the absent Lizzie within Michael's hearing. The violence Billy witnesses allows him to view his father in a different, brighter light.
     The conflict in Silent Tom is not physical, but verbal, in the Irish manner. The conflict in Is He Tough is physical and verbal in the human manner.
     In The New Bartender, Billy's brother Jack learns first-hand the hazards and delights of bartendering.