Most of the stories in … The State of Ireland focus on strange pairings off, on mismatched people whose unlikely relationships lead to surprising revelations, if not to spiritual transformations. In some cases, the participants in Kiely's brand of "strange friendship" wind up reversing their roles and seeing themselves (and their counterparts) with new and deeper insight….

Kiely's experiments with human identity continue throughout this collection. Guides become the guided, as in "The Dogs in the Great Glen," a story about an Irish-American professor who comes to Ireland "to search out his origins" in the wilds of County Kerry. The professor's guide is the narrator who, at the start of the journey, has an amused, condescending attitude towards the eager American. But as the two travelers near the mysterious "great Glen of Kanareen," the American becomes possessed with atavistic wisdom and the narrator … admits to himself that he "was...