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Morrissy recalls Joyce’s Dubliners in these compassionate stories of sex, death and temps perdu in Irish middle-class suburbia

The jacket description is somewhat coy. It is termed “an exploded novel” (whatever that is), “stories” that are “linked”, a “collection” that has a “strong narrative arc, very similar to that of a novel”. There are 18 stories, but they could equally be regarded as chapters because Prosperity Drive is novelistic in intent. Unlike a short story, the novel as a form demands that the reader immerse herself within its world and within its characters’ world for an often substantial duration. One of these characters in Prosperity Drive explains to her book club that “she favours short stories over novels because … her concentration is fatally flawed. ‘I’m plunged so deep into other people’s lives at work that when I come home, I want something I can escape from easily.’” If you do not wish to be plunged so deep into other people’s lives, this book is not for you, since Morrissy’s gift is to do precisely that.

Prosperity Drive is a fictional street of semi-detached houses in a middle-class Dublin suburb. It is named after the mansion, Prosperity House, on whose grounds it was built. The building was subsequently converted into a cancer hospital, or the “house of death”, as one character calls it while speculating on whether growing up in such proximity to it “fucked them up”. “It had done something to him: made him doomy, prone to darkness.”

The protagonists are the Elworthys: parents Edel and Victor, daughters Norah and Trish. The book opens with an elderly Edel, now suffering from Alzheimer’s. She has fallen at the top of the stairs and cannot get up. Norah is downstairs. Edel feels certain that Norah knows she has fallen, and we later discover that she is correct. Edel’s mind drifts as she lies splayed on the landing. Her past is more immediate to her than her present, and she is aware she has forgotten something crucial. Towards the end of the book, Edel finally retrieves this memory on her deathbed. In the closing story, she is young again and the incident is revealed.

Much of the considerable power of Morrissy’s prose lies in her technique of dipping seamlessly in and out of temps perdu. She tracks surfacing memories of incidents that formed and often damaged her characters. Several images and objects recur throughout the text, such as an embrace Edel witnesses between her husband and daughter. Edel does not like what she sees. It could be interpreted in several ways. Similarly, a seaside postcard signifies markedly different things to the people who behold it, yet the girl immortalised in it will never know of its existence.

Morrissy’s lost souls succeed in accessing emotional intensities in the unlikeliest of places. A dance with the office sex-pest at an awful 1970s Christmas work do is unexpectedly elevated into a transcendent experience for both parties, leaving them confused. Prosperity Drive’s epiphanic moments recall Joyce’s Dubliners, such as when an eloping girl panics and freezes at the gangplank, leaving her lover to sail abroad alone; or when children encounter a world of adult sexuality that they are not equipped to cope with.

The book spans decades, from the late 50s to the present day. An American family moves in and highlights the residents’ particularly Irish brand of frigidity – or paralysis, to continue the parallels with Joyce. American parents actually play with their children, a young girl notes in dismayed confusion. She is sentenced to spending the rest of her life trying to be the American girl who fascinated her as a child. Many of the children who grew up on Prosperity Drive run into each other again as adults, having failed to fly the nest. These encounters have the air of school reunions; the adults sheepishly assess one another and are saddened by what they find: “a fat, middle-aged envoy from a skinny and delicate childhood”.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the “prim respectability” strangling the street on which these characters grew up, Prosperity Drive is a book about sex and death. The protagonists – that “roll call of the damaged and the lost” – encounter both but are unable to handle either. The compassion, immediacy, humour and delicacy with which Morrissy depicts their predicaments result in moments of profundity.

Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know is published by Faber. To order Prosperity Drive for £12.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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