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Book corner
Tom Deignan reviews the latest Irish and Irish-American books.
 The
earlier decades of the 20th century provide the settings for two new works
of Irish-American fiction.
Dream When You’re Feeling Blue by Elizabeth Berg explores life
on the homefront during World War II, as seen through the eyes of the
three Irish-American Heaney sisters from Chicago.
Kitty, Louise, and Tish each have differing conflicts, and Berg
masterfully divides time between each character.
Kitty, for example, does not merely sit home and weep about her lad off
at war. Instead, she works a hard job at a manufacturing plant. In the
end, Berg illuminates this oft-forgotten era in U.S. history, while also
beautifully recreating a slice of Irish-American life.
($24.95 / 288 pages / Random House)
 Thomas
Mallon’s latest novel, Fellow Travelers, meanwhile, is set in the
1950s, in a Washington D.C. which is about to become consumed by the actions
of an Irish Catholic senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy.
But instead of focusing entirely on the well-known names in history (Richard
Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover make cameos), Mallon presents Tim Laughlin,
an Irish Catholic New York City boy from Fordham. A budding reporter,
his final assignment for his summer in the nation’s capital
is McCarthy’s wedding ceremony. Mallon is clearly looking to explore
class conflict when Laughlin, the working class Catholic, becomes
friends with a well-bred Boston Protestant who works at the State Department.
It turns out, however, that this seemingly privileged character harbors
a dark secret, which will expose him to the dark forces of persecution
sweeping through Washington during McCarthy’s reign. Mallon’s
fascinating twist is that Laughlin himself gets stuck in the web of lies
and deceit so many people were spinning during this time.
($32 / 343 pages / Pantheon)
 Tyrone
native Roisin McAuley combines romance and mystery in her latest book
Meeting Point, which shifts from the South of France to Ireland, as clues
to a gruesome cold case murder mystery are revealed.
Meeting Point begins with an investigator named Claire falling in love
with a mysterious stranger named John while on vacation. Claire is nagged
by the feeling she has met her lover in the past.
Is he related to the case of a dead woman whose body was found at the
bottom of a cliff in Northern Ireland, which seemed like a suicide? If
so, then why is Claire unable to control her passions about John?
At times predictable and breathlessly written, Meeting Point is nevertheless
a fine page-turner from the author of Singing Bird. ($24.95 / 320
pages / William Morrow)
In a sense, Thomas Mallon’s fictional portrait of Tim Laughlin
in Fellow Travelers supports the real-life themes of a new book by Joshua
Zeitz called White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of
Postwar Politics.
Exploring the Irish as well as other ethnic enclaves, Zeitz argues that
Irish Americans and other Catholics remained deeply unmelted even after
Word War II, when many people believed they’d simply faded into
the vast American middle class and became like everyone else.
“Between the 1940s and the late 1960s, New York’s three largest
white ethnic groups, Jews, Italian Catholics, and Irish Catholics, numbered
as many as 4.3 million people, roughly two thirds of New York’s
white population and more than half of its total population,” Zeitz
recently wrote in American Heritage, describing his book.
“In New York, for instance, in any given year upwards of two thirds
of all Catholic children from kindergarten through eighth grade were enrolled
in parish schools. At home and in parish schools, generations of Catholic
New Yorkers internalized a respect for public and religious authority
and a general skepticism of radical dissent, attitudes that were at once
the product of their religious subculture and a reflection of their
predominantly homogeneous working-class environment.”
($24.95 / 296 pages / North Carolina)
Irish historian and scholar Padraig O’Malley, currently a professor
at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, turns his attention to the
struggle for freedom in South Africa in his latest book Shades of Difference:
Mac Maharaj and the Struggle for South Africa.
This book is an exploration of South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement
as well as the story of a heretofore little-known liberator, Mac Maharaj,
a South African freedom fighter of Indian descent.
An agitator for four decades, Maharaj eventually spent twelve years in
jail alongside Nelson Mandela, before serving in the negotiations which
led to an independent South Africa in 1994.
O’Malley’s book includes an introduction by Mandela.
($32.95 / 672 pages / Viking)
Finally, for those who prefer listening to reading, an 18-disc set of
Samuel Beckett: Three Novels has just been released. Barry McGovern (who
has performed a one-man show based on Beckett’s work) reads Molloy,
Malone and The Unnamable, all written in the 1940s. Beckett, of course,
is best known for his plays, particularly Waiting for Godot. But any list
of the great novels of the 20th century also must include these three
masterpieces.
($70 / RTE-Lannan)
Dublin theater veteran Declan Hughes has given mystery fiction another
try with his second thriller The Color of Blood.
Set in Dublin, The Color of Blood features investigator Ed Loy, who is
hired by a member of one of Dublin’s most respectable families.
Loy is charged with finding the missing daughter of venerable dentist
Shane Howard. Swiftly, however, a missing-person case becomes a murder
case, when people related to the missing girl start dying. But even those
cases are less complicated than the clues Loy is uncovering about the
beloved Howard family.
Not unlike John Banville’s recent mystery Christine Falls (written
as Benjamin Black), The Color of Blood is also about the corruption at
the heart of respectable Dublin.
For 20 years, Hughes has worked as a director and playwright in Dublin.
His skills with pacing and plot are put to excellent use in The Color
of Blood.
($24.95 / 352 pages /William Morrow)
Galway resident Ken Bruen has legions of Irish fans because of his Jack
Taylor series. His latest is actually set in London, and features Inspector
Brant. All the same, expect a lot of what Bruen does best in Ammunition:
dark humor, twisted plots and violent crimes. Ammunition kicks into high
gear when Brant and numerous others are gunned down at a pub, leaving
him near death – but also thirsty for revenge. This sets up Bruen’s
vengeance-driven novel, which will most definitely win over fans
of Bruen’s Taylor series.
($13.95 / 272 pages / St. Martin’s Minotaur)
Editor and poet Daniel Tobin took on a mammoth task in attempting to compile
the most authoritative collection of Irish-American poetry. The result
is The Book of Irish American Poetry: From the Eighteenth Century to the
Present, and weighs in at nearly 800 pages.
Some legitimate questions have been raised about this book. A Publisher’s
Weekly review, for example, wondered if the many poets gathered in this
volume are Irish in any way other than their name. Another way to look
at this is that along with explicitly Irish-American poetry from the likes
of Billy Collins, Galway Kinnell and Paul Muldoon, you get noticeably
less Irish-themed work from the likes of Marianne Moore and Tess Gallagher.
Either way, this book is a must- have for lovers of Irish and Irish-American
writing.
($65 / 760 pages / University of Notre Dame Press)
 Pete
Hamill is famous for numerous reasons. He was a pioneering newspaperman,
and remains a provocative commentator and celebrated memoirist. He was
a man about town who befriended the Kennedys and later stepped out with
Jackie Onassis. He is also an unofficial ambassador for New York, the
city where his Belfast-born parents raised their large family.
All of this sometimes makes it easy to forget that Hamill is a brilliant
writer of fiction, who (as has often been said about Philip Roth)
is getting better with age.
Hamill’s recent novels have been ambitious efforts, and have only
strengthened his reputation as one of New York’s great chroniclers.
Joyce had his Dublin, Dickens had his London and Hamill has New York.
Hamill’s latest, North River, gets its title from the old-time name
for the Hudson River. Not far from the river’s frigid waters, in
1930s Greenwich Village, lives Dr. James Delaney, a scarred veteran of
World War I who cares for the neighborhood’s sick and suffering,
even though he’s unable to heal his own wounds. Aside from his service
in the Great War, Dr. Delaney has also lost his wife and daughter. To
make matters more difficult, the winter of 1934 (when North River
is set) is turning out to be particularly cold, and there seems no end
in sight to the Great Depression, which is ravaging the locals, who are
unable to pay for the crucial medical services which Dr. Delaney still
provides.
Amidst all of this, an infant (belonging to Delaney’s daughter)
has been left on his stoop. Despite all of this adversity, after Dr. Delaney
hires an Italian immigrant named Rose to help out, he unwittingly creates
a surrogate family to replace the one he has lost. Just as a tenuous sort
of peace is established, however, it turns out that Delaney’s compassion
and selflessness may have gotten him into serious trouble with a
local gangster.
In the end, North River has the feel of a tough yet beautiful ballad,
rich with local details and color, and unflinching in its depiction
of life’s difficulties.
With North River, Hamill has proven yet again that he is among the top
novelists working today.
($25.99 / 352 pages / Little, Brown)
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