I have long regarded it as the best prose fiction in the language and so, in a hiatus in available new books to read this weekend just gone I read The Dead, amongst other things, and found no reason to revise that opinion.
In forty pages it is paced through a calmly observed and beautifully captured social occasion of some awkwardness through some first pangs of anxiety and discomfiture and growing alarm to the most beautiful elegiac and very famous ending. Understatement and the assured measure of every phrase and sentence, one after the other, allows a devastating, quiet bomb to go off in the final paragraphs.
The whole book has built towards it as the stories get longer and more involved but in the end the appetite for escape from Ireland, the need for release, implodes back westwards to the snow covered grave of the lost teenager, Gabriel Conroy's wife's first love, who 'died for her' and who he realizes he can never replace.
Of course, Joyce went on to bigger, more iconic things and in fact reached an impasse from which literature probably couldn't proceed. I have read that his next book, after Finnegan's Wake, would have been a return to something more traditional but whether it would have been better than this, written in his early twenties, must remain open to doubt.
It's a great shame we never found out.
