{moszoomthumb imgid=1101 itemid=74 style_m=2}‘The Secret Scripture’ by Sebastian Barry

Poet, playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry continues with the story of the Sligo-born McNultys in his latest novel, “The Secret Scripture.” Barry first introduced the family in his 1999 novel “The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty.” This latest novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and recently came out in paperback, tells the tale of Roseanne Clear with all the poignancy and lyricism we’ve come to expect from the best of Ireland’s writers.

Roseanne resides in the soon-to-be-demolished Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, where all patients are being evaluated to determine whether they need continued institutionalization or can return to society. Approaching her 100th year, Roseanne has been at the hospital longer than the staff or any other patient, and no one seems to remember why she is there. When the assigned psychiatrist Dr. Grene looks back through her records and finds several discrepancies, he sets out to discover her story through his evaluation.

Barry structures the novel between written texts and conversations: Roseanne’s personal memoirs (which she writes and hides beneath her floorboards), Dr. Grene’s written evaluations, and conversations between the two. As their relationship develops, Roseanne’s version of her road to commitment begins to unfold. It began one evening when Father Gaunt, a Catholic priest, is asked to issue last rights to a Protestant boy felled during the Irish Civil War. Roseanne’s Protestant father Joseph Clear is the cemetery caretaker and is asked against protocol to bury the man. 

When it’s later discovered that the grave contains guns and not the body of Willie Lavelle, Joseph is suspected of sympathizing with the Irish resistance. This leads to his brutal murder, which the 12-year-old Roseanne witnesses. Father Gaunt becomes a continued presence in her life, subsequently trying to force Roseanne into marrying the Protestant grave keeper who took her father’s position. When she refuses, Gaunt does not disappear and instead interferes in her later marriage to Tom McNulty—a union frowned upon by both McNulty’s parents and the priest himself. 

‘Brooklyn’
by Colm Tóibín
262 pages, 2009 Scribner
 
and

‘Let the Great World Spin’
by Colum McCann
350 pages, 2009 Random House

The City that Never Sleeps. Gotham. The Big Apple. The Capital of the World. The Empire City. Whatever you call it, New York is one of the most historically and culturally important cities on the planet. Every year, dozens of movies and television shows and hundreds of books are based in NYC. And while it was beginning to seem like an old hat to use NYC as a setting, two Irish authors have recently written such remarkable novels about a particular time in the city’s history that it seems impossible to doubt that it will ever go out of fashion. Both bring NYC to life not only as a place but as a character itself.

“Brooklyn,” by Colm Tóibín, takes place in the 1950s. It’s the story of Eilis, a young Dubliner who is sent by her family to live in America. Brooklyn, specifically. Across the ocean is the promise of work, something scarce in Ireland at the time. Eilis is a no frills, modest young woman, with a head for numbers and a life devoid of the drama and romance seemingly experienced by other girls her age. She loves her simple life at home with her mother and sister and is (inwardly) outraged when it is arranged for her to travel to New York. But Eilis’s family members are proud, stoic people, and so off she silently goes on a harrowing journey across the sea.

{moszoomthumb imgid=1073 itemid=74 style_m=2}short story writer Wells Tower offers debut collection 

‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’ by Wells Tower
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
256 pages

Wells Tower’s short story “Leopard,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker and is included in his debut collection “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” is the kind of story that easily, graciously, commands attention. Written in the second person, it places the reader squarely in the awkward body and consciousness of an 11-year-old boy suffering two major indignities: an upper-lip fungal infection and a sarcastic stepfather. The former draws the unkind attention of an alpha-male classmate at school, who sets the whole cafeteria to name-calling with one incisive insult (“Even you had to admire the succinct poetry of the line”).

It’s thanks to that insult that you, the protagonist, play sick to save face and stay home from school, only to find yourself in a faceoff with antagonist number two. Unlike other adults, who “have more important things to worry about,” your stepfather suspects your every fib and “will spend days gathering evidence to prove that those are your teeth marks on a pen you said you hadn’t chewed.” Doubting your infirmity, he asks you to walk half a mile to get the mail. You grumble, drag your feet and chuck driveway gravel into the woods, “hoping that those handfuls will cost a lot of money to replace.” On the way home, clutching the mail and a flyer for a lost pet resembling a leopard, you contrive an act of passive resistance of tremendous creativity—and certain failure.

{moszoomthumb imgid=1046 itemid=74 style_m=2}‘Nobody Move’
by Denis Johnson    
196 pages, Picador

Denis Johnson’s latest novel is characterized mainly by its abruptness. It begins abruptly, with a compulsive gambler named Jimmy Luntz getting forced into a copper-colored Cadillac by a large, lumbering man named Gambol. Luntz owes some debts that he’s in no position to pay, and Gambol’s intentions appear less than friendly. Where they’re going or what, exactly, Gambol has planned, is left to the imagination.

“On this kind of trip, you don’t want to ask where it ends,” Gambol explains.

But then, just as abruptly, we find Luntz on the phone with the sheriff’s department, declaring that “A guy’s just been shot.” The guy is Gambol, who now has a hole in his leg, and the shot was fired by Luntz. He proceeds to commandeer Gambol’s Cadillac and drive off, leaving a dangerous thug bleeding on the pavement.