Simon Van Booy labeled this collection of short stories "Inventive, witty and profoundly human." I can absolutely attest to that. The Independent, a UK publication that I assume is a magazine, said of The Weight of a Human Heart, "O'Neill is... joyfully original with format... [in] this collection." Also very true. However, I do not agree entirely with Wiley Cash's comment on the book: "If someone asked me to name my ideal collection of contemporary short fiction, I'd point to The Weight of the Human Heart and say, 'This is it.'" While I certainly enjoyed Ryan O'Neill's stories, they got to be mildly irritating in their redundancy toward the last several pieces.
How can I summarize twenty-one (somewhat) different stories in only a few sentences? That's a difficult task to carry out. But the summary given on the jacket gives one sentence on just a few of the stories, so I'll do the same here: In the one story that was more amusing than depressing, a gay man's wife confesses to loving his brother, a criminal, as she dies. A boy living in his comic books drives his mother to suicide by his choice to live with his cruel, emotionally abusive father rather than her. The wife of one of the multiple English teachers in the book has an affair with his top student. The neglected daughter of a drug addict and heartless writer of a mother cares for her dying parent in the story that gives the book its name. And now, an elaboration of my opinion.
In beginning this collection, I was amazed by the convincing humanity of O'Neill's characters, his brilliant feats of format and his touching plots. However, while each of the stories was a work of art in its own right, I was disappointed in the compilation as a whole as I continued to read and found that many of his main characters are roughly the same; fourteen of the twenty-one main characters are white, Australian men like their creator. Two of those teach English to foreign people as a profession (as does a female character in "The Saved"), three are aging, and five are writers of one genre or another, as are some of their wives. There are also three stories having to do with the genocide in Rwanda, and one member of nearly every couple whose relationship plays a significant role in its respective piece is unfaithful. Again, despite the fact that the individual stories are some of the best you'll ever read, the O'Neill's repetitiousness is... well, tiresome.
I should warn potential readers that several of the pieces in The Weight of a Human Heart include the following: highly offensive language (as in enough to make a movie rated R), affairs, references of the kind you probably want to avoid, substance abuse, and extremely dismal and distressing content. In O'Neill's defense, these kinds of things help a lot in writing something "profoundly human," but I'll admit that it does make for a rather uncomfortable read at times. On that happy note, allow me to close with a statement by Megan Mayhew Bergman: "The Weight of a Human Heart is refreshing, funny, devastating. Ryan O'Neill's stories break rules to great effect; they're adventurous, textured, full of heart. His prose is active and vivid; his characters are imperfectly real, out in the world and under pressure. ... [O'Neill's] stories are... deeply satisfying and offer glimpses into worlds readers need to see, worlds that are vile, beautiful, and utterly human." B
