What struck me about those lines in “The Boarding House” was how expertly they disguised themselves as banal. We were supposed to be studying Travels with Charley, but could anyone really expect me to read Steinbeck after Joyce? That year, I decided that I would go to University College in Dublin, and if that failed, then I would go to the nearby Trinity College. I finished my math test early so that I could get back to my book, I was asked to leave English class the next day when my teacher caught me reading the copy of Dubliners I had tucked into my backpack. I tore through several stories during lunch, and even reread “Araby,” a story about a young boy who offers to buy a trinket for a girl he likes. I had borrowed the book from my high school library-I heard the name Joyce thrown around the house, and Dubliners was the shortest of his volumes. I had never imagined that writing could ever be that incisive, or that precise. Before “The Boarding House,” I had never imagined that anxiety could have collateral damage-that one might not be able to shave even though one might desperately want to, or that a scared fog might collect on one’s glasses. Three days’ reddish beard fringed his jaws and every two or three minutes a mist gathered on his glasses so that he had to take them off and polish them with his pocket-handkerchief.” The moment I read those lines I knew right away what it felt like to be unshaven and to wait for a girl’s mother, even though I couldn’t grow a beard in 8th grade, and I certainly never had a girlfriend. One morning, the owner asks to see him, and the young man waits in anguish before meeting with her: “He had made two attempts to shave but his hand had been so unsteady that he had been obliged to desist. In the story a young man staying in a boarding house becomes involved with the owner’s daughter. It was half way through “The Boarding House,” a story from James Joyce’s collection Dubliners, published exactly 100 years ago, that I realized what good writing really was.

Dubliners by james joyce