D. W. White is the Prose Editor for West Trade Review and Editor of L'Esprit Literary Review. His writing appears in 3:AM, The Florida Review, Necessary Fiction, and Chicago Review of Books, among others. He's currentlly a Ph.D. Candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where he teaches fiction workshop and classes on the work of Rachel Cusk.
Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong; Biblioasis; 272 pages; $17.99.
As a form, the novel looks like many things; at times, little like a novel at all. If the autofiction “debate” (conversation? collective mania?) is about the point when a novel becomes a memoir, a less discussed but possibly more engrossing topic swirls around the point where a linked story collection becomes a novel, and back again. What’s the difference, we might be tempted to ask, between a novel comfortable making large structural leaps and a book of short stories adept at holding together a number of running threads? Not much of one, perhaps, and we are again reminded that the novel is a protean thing, always lurking around a corner just when it seems we’ve gotten away.
The extent to which Maggie Armstrong’s Old Romantics is not a novel is debatable. What seems to be markedly less controversial is that there is a clear vision running through the book, which at its best displays first-person prose of stunningly high quality and a belief in language at once arresting and propellant. The collection (let’s call it that, at least for a little while), follows a woman named Margaret, via both first- and third-person, in a grouping of scenes assembled in such a way to illustrate her quotidian challenges, in work, love, loss, house-hunting—in other words, the stuff of literary fiction. It thereby succeeds on the sentence level, as Armstrong proves herself to be yet another addition to the overwhelming lineage of Irish writers:
I was never exactly physically attracted to Dan, though I remember him with an obstinate tenderness even
now. His bright, startled-animal eyes behind the frames, black Shavian beard growing thickly around his
features, bobbling navy duffel coat with the buttons done up around what looked like an expansion of
waistline. Walking around the rooms with him, I underwent an enormous inner transformation. I became
completely new and shy and full of possibility, lingering at a bedroom door, or nodding at the ersatz bronze
claw feet of the bathtub, which still merited eager nodding, for being claw-foot.
Armstrong can certainly handle both, but it is that first person which truly drives Old Romantics, where Margaret’s insouciant, mordant, fragmented way of seeing and relating the world shine through. It is also where the book’s novelistic DNA becomes most apparent: while the language will keep the reader on the page, the narrative, as it unfolds within and across the stories, will keep her turning them. The first five stories, which are probably, in some order, the most effective in the collection, provide crucial context and narrative weight for the rest, meaning that Old Romantics’ internal logic is operative novelistically far more than in a true story collection, marketing strategies notwithstanding. The readerly investment builds, and is sustained, as first we understand this is the same character, and then see more and more of her.
While the book’s clear strength is in first person—nowhere else as thoroughly as the titular piece, an excellent, playful menacing meditation on modern relationships—the first story “Number One,” written in third, is a well-chosen inaugural. Kicking things off with the story of how, in a clever punning on the title and the man, Margaret loses her virginity—a narrative arc that is considerably more successful due to, and in fact only really makes sense in light of, the fact that we see much more of this character and her romantic entanglements as the book (novel) moves along:
‘What about you,’ she said. ‘Do you work around here?’ ‘My work is varied,’ he said, ‘but I have a flat over
there.’ He glanced up the narrow jumble of shops, pubs, massage parlours, bubble tea houses, takeaways. ‘You
should come visit.’ And though her chest tightened like a fist, she knew that she would go through with it, and
she wrote his address on a business card in her wallet; his phone wasn’t working.
She wondered was this it. For a long time, she had treasured this uniqueness of hers, but the thing had gone
rusty on her, and she guessed that getting rid of it would be painful but forgettable, a quick job. After work, she
went to the pharmacy.
The emotional register, somewhat flat-affect, and verbal acuity on display here—embedded in fine movement skills—powers Old Romantics when it’s at its best, and slightly abandons the book at times when it stumbles. While the storylines at times grow repetitive, and some readers may struggle with maintaining a connection to a character so recursive in thought—both critiques, not for nothing, pointing to an area where the book might have been even stronger as a “traditional” novel—these are surely minor quibbles, if they indeed be quibbles at all. As Margaret’s arc moves along, from bad dates in worse apartments to apocalyptic vacations to the United States, through pregnancy scares and miscarriage scares and thoughts of abortion to stepdaughters and dying wives of lovers, Old Romantics manages to be both moving and irreverent, entertaining and disarming, concrete and expansive. It contains, we might say, a novel of multitudes.
Armstrong’s debut fits into a lineage that, in recent times, is perhaps most notably inclusive of Rachel Cusk’s The Lucky Ones, but also includes work from writers such as Lucy Corin, Christopher Linforth, Marisa Matarazzo, Margaret Malone, Rebecca Fishow, and Cara Blue Adams. A bit farther back and we can locate Armstrong’s book in dialogue with Denis Johnson, Katherine Anne Porter, James Joyce. It is Adams’ You Never Get It Back, however, that perhaps offers the most purchase in considering Old Romantics; both debuts trace, via narrationally disparate approaches, a young(er) woman navigating tempestuous personal relationships while orbiting, in some sense, a predilection for writing. The way the two collections differ, too, tells us something about the way the literary marketplace has evolved on either side of the Atlantic: Adams’ book is darker, more serious, earnest and in that way seeming to be more American, where Armstrong is funnier, drier, wittier linguistically and thereby feels more Irish in sensibility. That both books have so readily identifiably a tonal register speaks, too, to their novelistic density.
Locating Old Romantics in such a tradition may lend some traction to its literary ancestry, although to make too much of such things is often the critic’s demise. Novels, like other art forms, work by being idiosyncratic while generic; they provide certain, semi-anticipated landmarks in surprising manners and at surprising times. In this way, they are unique. Story collections, even those that may actually be novels in disguise, are the same: it never sounds nearly as interesting on the back cover as it feels in the pages themselves. In this way, the comment it makes on that most elusive and miraculous of art forms, and what in turn such a thing says about us, may be the most compelling ware Old Romantics has on offer—besides, that is, the pleasure of reading it.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
When Was The Last Time You Slept?: Stories as Novels as Stories in Maggie Armstrong's Old Romantics
FICTION REVIEW
by D.W. White
April 28, 2025
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Image by Clicker Happy from Pexels
© 2025 Iron Oak Editions
