If you're hoping for a review of an Irish short story collection that doesn't mention James Joyce, move along: there's nothing to see here. From time to time the Irish literary establishment tries to give Joyce the slip. Frank O'Connor, the great Irish short-story writer, wrote: "I think I almost said 'Thank God' when Joyce died. There must have been young men who said 'Thank God' when Byron died " More recently Anne Enright kept him out of her Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, only letting in authors born since 1899 so as to defend the volume's "strong eye to the contemporary". But, like Leopold Bloom climbing over the railings at 7 Eccles Street, his creator has a habit of sneaking back in to contemporary Irish letters.

"Two Little Clouds", from Where Have You Been?, Joseph O'Connor's first short story collection in 21 years, is, the author notes, "a response" to Joyce's story "A Little Cloud". But while the frame may be Joyce's, the story's ironic twist is closer to the method of Maupassant or O Henry. In Joyce's story, a man angry at the forces that have denied him the life he wanted realises his own timidity is to blame. O'Connor's story, which features the recurring character Eddie Virago  antihero of O'Connor's 1991 debut novel, Cowboys and Indians  rests on the double irony that the picture Eddie paints of his wild life turns out to be false, and that this delusional braggart has returned from London to sell houses "in southside Dublin for a couple of million yo-yos" in 2007, just months before the Irish economy implodes. Eddie is at least as self-deceiving as Joyce's Little Chandler, but O'Connor chooses to hold him up for ridicule rather than explore his self-deceit, and by extension the nationwide self-deceit of the boom years. In this way the story doesn't so much respond to "A Little Cloud" as repeat it as farce.

The boom's "fickleness of spirit" is touched on in "Death of a Civil Servant", set in 2004, a time when you "couldn't trust a taxi man to collect you at eleven  everything contingent on a more lucrative door not opening". The story's mournful tone is typical of O'Connor's recent style, which has shifted from the somewhat blokey comedy of his early books into the elegiac mood of Star of the Sea and Ghost Light. His novels have also grown more formally adventurous, employing an array of registers and media  pamphlets, play fragments, Hansard extracts and ballads  but the stories seem deprived of this confidence. In "October-Coloured Weather", a woman dying of cancer meets an American tour guide whose speech  "And there's this hairdressing smell too? That metallic smell you get with hairspray? The pine-scented shampoo? You know? It don't smell like pine, it's like a committee's idea of what pine smells like?"  doesn't seem the work of the man who inhabited so many American idioms in Redemption Falls.

At 100 pages the title story is described as a novella. But if novella is an inbetween word, "Where Have You Been?" is an inbetween work. "Leave certain scenes out and a story acquires dimension," notes Cian, its main character. There are lacunae here that both expand the world of the story and eloquently portray Irish male reticence: Cian and his brother are adopted "in circumstances I don't wish to detail"; his dead mother's story "is too painful to tell here" (mothers often meet sad ends in O'Connor's fiction). But its emotional intensity is allowed to dissipate in aimless passages, such as an interminable chat between Cian's lover and his father, and the story feels a honing edit short of completion.

No such problems hamper "The Wexford Girl", the one really excellent story here. Frank O'Connor believed the short story to be characterised most of all by "an intense awareness of human loneliness", and it's this O'Connor movingly displays here, through the disintegration of a marriage (another commonplace in his work) and the relationship between a loving young boy and his beleaguered father. The one strange thing to note is that the story is a rewrite of the title story in O'Connor's first collection, True Believers. "The Wexford Girl" is far superior, but having knowledge of both is distracting, like reading an imperfectly erased palimpsest on which can be seen traces of the artist as a young man.