SOURCE: Eckley, Grace. “Rich and Rare Gems: The Short Fiction.” In Benedict Kiely, pp. 40-53. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972.

In the following essay, Eckley offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Kiely's short fiction.

Sean McMahon, when he commented on Kiely's fiction for Eire-Ireland, described it as “glowing with eloquence and distinguished by a facility that makes writing seem as easy as singing. Indeed, if he has a fault, it is a tendency to be operatic. Some people have been disconcerted by this and by an occasional contrived brilliance when he is too consciously a performer. He has been accused of sentimentality, an odd fault in so realistic a writer.”¹ But not merely Kiely's diction makes the prose work poetic or operatic; both his sentences and his paragraphs are rhythmically and symmetrically constructed, as is shown in the following paragraph, which begins simply, swells like a cresendo in...