Binchy's fiction is comic in the most classic sense of the word. Her flawed characters persist in spite of their blunders, foibles, and faults. Mixups and misunderstandings abound, yet even when her stories do not end entirely happily, the characters generally experi ence something that gives them hope.

They find that at the very least, they can endure. Some find that they can prevail.

In The Irish Comic Tradition (1962), literary scholar Vivian Mercier traces what he calls "the prevalence of the comic spirit in Anglo-Irish literature of the twentieth century." Mercier begins with Irish Gaelic mythology and proceeds to trace the varieties of the comic spirit through many mainstream Irish writers, including James Joyce (1882-1941). It seems unfair to compare the best-selling Binchy to a male writer who has more devotees committed to unraveling the complex style in which he wrote than he ever had readers...