Reviewed by Mary McWay Seaman,Celtic Connection, December, 2008Every so often, a literary jewel radiates beams of breathtaking, iridescent force. Sebastian Barry”s THE SECRET SCRIPTURE, with the heft and lilt of eloquent simplicity, is one such novel – a tale of mystery, love, war, repression and redemption spanning the last 100 years in Ireland. Roseanne Clear McNulty is a centenarian warehoused in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, a vintage institution scheduled for demolition. All patients are being assessed for relocation. As a young woman, Roseanne had been admitted to the Sligo Insane Asylum, which morphed into the Sligo Mental Hospital. Her diagnosis and her long-ago move to Roscommon are mysteries lurking within misplaced records. Sixty-five-year-old Dr. William Grene, Roseanne”s psychiatrist, struggles with her transfer, recognizing that many inmates “are not so much mad as homeless and ancient.” Considering the history of mental institutions, he notes that “no sensitive person would choose to be the historian of the Irish asylums in the first part of the last century . . .” Grene concedes that some patients “were incarcerated shall we say for social reasons, rather than medical . . . and continuing in this day and age to be held.” His evaluation of Roseanne is frustrated not only by missing files, but by her silence. Some local folks know Roseanne”s secrets, and one of them works on her floor. The story sings within a duet of dueling journals: those of Irish Protestant Roseanne and English Catholic Grene. Hers is secreted beneath the floorboards of her room, and his is a personal record apart from official paperwork. Roseanne on Grene: “The beauty of Dr. Grene is that he is entirely humourless, which makes him actually quite humourous. Believe me, this is a quality to be treasured in this place.” The doctor, a childless man with marital troubles of his own making, suddenly becomes widowed. His relationship with Roseanne, despite its perfunctory appearance, blooms into quiet friendship, “touched by a sort of benign lightning, something primitive, strange, and oddly clear.”Roseanne grew up as the only child of Sligo Presbyterians ” her father had been a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary and a cemetery caretaker demoted to rat-catcher after the Irish Civil War. As a teenager, Roseanne witnessed her father assisting anti-partition rebels in burying one of their fallen. She and her father were wrongly blamed for alerting the authorities when, at the rebels” request, Roseanne contacted a priest. Father Gault “was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer.” But Gaunt was “not one of those people that shy away from you when you need them, like many of his brethren, too proud to taste the rain in their mouths.”Part of Roseanne”s journal chronicles her convent school education, where the nuns “savage as they were, though they wielded sticks against us with every ounce of energy in their bodies . . . they were interesting women enough. But I must let them go. My story hurries me on.” Roseanne married a Catholic man, Tom McNulty, against the wishes of his family, especially angering his mother – a classic incarnation of the super-religious, self-righteous, autocratic matron of her place and time, albeit with irregularities in her own past. The McNultys ran a dancehall during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s in the heyday of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington. In the words of Dr. Grene, “This is all long ago, in the savage fairytale of life in Ireland in the twenties and thirties, mostly, though the period of her [Roseanne”s] greatest difficulty seems to have occurred actually during the years of the emergency, as de Valera referred to the Second World War.” Depictions of “amon de Valera present an identity-politics profile extraordinaire. Dr. Grene eventually locates Roseanne”s file, rich with Father Gaunt”s accounts – accounts that differ radically from those in Roseanne”s journal. Gaunt”s notes reveal that Roseanne”s in-laws were employed at the Sligo asylum when she was admitted, and Grene begins to assemble pieces of a horrendous conspiracy involving kinfolk, church and state. Whopper-sized lies shout from the old paperwork, proving that Gaunt “betrays at every stroke an intense hatred . . . of women. . .” Furthermore, he regarded Roseanne”s “Protestantism as a simple, primal evil in itself.” The ghastly reach of a tyrannical clergy with fingers in every nook and cranny of politics, government, commerce, society, education and family life was a power “leading as day does to night to absolute corruption.” The perfect storm of intricately-crafted events leading up to the final travesty forms a singular, explosive piece of art.Roseanne consoles herself in her journal: “The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire.” However, one monstrous grief remains: it entwines doctor and patient as they wrestle to reconcile the irreconcilable on resplendent, aching final pages that are turned too soon.

Reviewed by Mary McWay Seaman,
Celtic Connection, April, 2008 How often do our mortal selves bear scrutiny as a mighty chunk of nature, chiseled as we are by technological realignments to flesh, blood and bone? Probably not too often; rather, we use “nature” as a reference to outdoor surroundings and the birds, the beasts and the blossoms of the wilderness. Nature writers like Robert Finch ordinarily focus on creatures and habitats outside the human realm, but Finch”s new book, THE IAMBICS OF NEWFOUNDLAND, makes a creative inspection of us as “nature” in a remote part of North America. His rambles across Newfoundland (including Labrador) from 1987 to 1996 are distilled in this captivating probe of the area”s prime natural commodity ” people. Generous helpings of anthropology, sociology, biology, botany, geology and politics season his studies, and loads of local humor and lively gatherings of the citizenry offer a graceful portrait of man”s adaptation to a punishing, resplendent habitat. Beginning in the sixteenth century, Newfoundland”s native Beothuk Indians were joined by succeeding waves of Basque whalers from France and Spain, British farmers from Dorset, Devon and Cornwall, Irish laborers from Waterford, and Portuguese fishermen seeking shelter from the tempests. Newfoundland”s capital, St. John”s, was once a prominent seaport famous for cod harvests, but the decline of its main fish brought hard times. This hilly port city is home to garrulous natives with accents akin to Irish, prompting the author to remark on its “charming lack of self-awareness.” The Old World is immediately brought to mind with structures boldly painted in contrasting colors, reminiscent of the Irish port of Cobh, County Cork. In 1949 Newfoundland became part of Canada, but St. John”s still summons an eighteenth-century character with laneways and pedestrian alleys layered over ancient footpaths. Finch”s vigorous analysis of the settlement”s turbulent history tenders some heart-rending testimonies. The city has a long reputation as a tough drinking town, “where, less than a century ago, children of ten or twelve years who worked on the wharves were paid in “lots” of rum by the merchants, so that scores of young boys staggered home drunk from twelve-hour workdays.” Observations about education and the oral history of Newfoundland before unification with Canada will surprise readers. “Schoolchildren . . .grew up with a more-or-less ordered idea of the sequence of British monarchs or the course of the American Revolution, while their own history survived in a dreamtime of stories, verses, ballads, jokes and a dialect that shared more with nineteenth-century Devon than with twentieth-century Toronto.” Finch is at his finest in depicting his relationships with individual Newfoundlanders in their distinct districts. A robust regionalism marks this land with its own time zone (Newfoundland Standard Time is 30 minutes ahead of the other Atlantic Provinces). Villages and towns are called and colored by their particular Irish or English ancestry, (the clans still cling together) and larger communities are defined by their Irish Catholic and British Protestant sections.Newfoundland provides a close encounter with the speech patterns of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland and Britain. Delightful passages of humorous, musical vernacular are a sublime treat. The author notes that, “Like most places with widely dispersed and long-isolated populations, Newfoundland has spawned a wealth of local dialects. In St. John”s and in most towns on the Avalon Peninsula, local speech exhibits a strong Irish rhythm and lilt.” Amazingly, the distinct Irish dialect of early nineteenth-century Waterford remains intact, and “Irishisms such as curwibble, flaboolach, glawvawn, kawnya-vawnya, loodle-daddle, noody-nawdy, shabeen, sleveen, and pampooty dance playfully across the palate.” People of all ages are greeted as “my son,” or “my maid,” (phrases still heard in the Ozarks and Appalachia), and the Newfie “f” is often pronounced as a “v.” Accordion players are called “fiddlers,” and a bounty of other idiomatic terms and phrases percolate across the pages. The verbal stew also combines bits of Celtic and French salted with some “mangled Latin.” The language of Virgil, Horace and Ovid weaves itself into daily discourse in the doorways of St. John”s with such terms as “Tallis Quallis,” a common colloquialism for “such as it is.” Linguists, historians and casual readers will find themselves glued to the pages as passionate conversationalists share opinions on everything from churches to caribou carcasses.The sparkling discussion of language continues with examples of mixed subject and verb forms, such as “I plans, and we wants.” Finch relates that, “Virtually all uses of present-tense verbs are given the third-person singular form” an example of which follows: “I plans to go up to the hall Saturday night. Is you thinking of coming along?” Some objects have genders, similar to Latin and French, although the genders might change – e.g., “He was reputed to be a good boat, but I didn”t care much for she.” Finch relays that he “caught most of what the men said when they talked directly to me, but when they began talking among themselves I was generally lost. This seemed to be a common trait among outport people, adapting their dialect somewhat to the person being spoken to, and then reverting to their native dialect among themselves.” Interestingly, many locals refer to the United States as the “Boston States,” a term from Depression days when many Newfoundlanders sought work in Massachusetts. I wished for a map within the book, but tracked Finch”s trail with an atlas close at hand. Evocative place names ring out harmoniously, and the geographic nomenclature enchants ” a “tickle” is a narrow passage of water between cliffs, and a “landwash” is a beach. Place names on tundra, barrens, boggy wetlands, forests and seacoasts allude to their histories. Signal Hill, Cuckold”s Head, Quidi Vidi Harbour, Salvage, Little Careless Brook, Squid Tickle, St. Bride”s, Placentia and Trepassy are just a few places with old stories behind them. From the Cape Spear lighthouse and park to Cape St. Mary”s gannet colony, from barren moorlands to the Cape Pine lighthouse, the author”s expertise on the natural world (beyond our own flesh) asserts itself with eloquence. Moose and caribou hunts are an important financial and cultural industry in Newfoundland. Finch went completely native when he deployed himself on a hunt with Newfie friends, and tales of this adventure include the added amusements of dodging tricky, bureaucratic hunting regulations. As in Ireland, governmental rules are subject to broad interpretations and loose translations. Indeed, our nature writer decided that the “whole system seems to be widely regarded as something to manipulate or evade.” Newfoundland”s seal hunts are under attack by animal rights groups, especially after a much-publicized incident involving the three Hearn brothers who supposedly “tortured” some seals a few years ago. Such brouhaha could only occur when an older, hardier, closer-to-nature culture rebuffs teachings from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). Hunters continue to rail against blustering busybodies who interfere with natural resource interactions (hunting traditions) dating back several centuries.Towards the end of this memorable tour, I read and reread the author”s remarks as he watched a Seinfeld rerun and found himself “wondering what Newfoundlanders make of such a narcissistic, nihilistic, irony-drenched portrait of life.” Robert Finch, nature writer, correspondent, interpreter, historian and scout, salutes the bewitching, merry people of Newfoundland and their boundless bonhomie in this joyous, irresistible account. 

Reviewed by Mary McWay Seaman,Celtic Connection, July, 2007 Short story collections make irresistible traveling companions, and Thomas McGuane”s distinguished new volume, GALLATIN CANYON, delivers ten edgy displacement dramas perfectly fitted for interludes on the plane, by the pool or on the back porch. It”s a book to open at random; journey first with the traveler trekking across the page presented by chance – a lonely pilgrim out on the road, searching for sanctuary somewhere up ahead. McGuane probes relationships run aground by plopping characters down on distant soil and thrusting them into clumsy accommodations to troublesome surroundings. Leery of the locals and suspicious of their routines, folks struggle to settle in and shed some personal baggage. These outsiders maintain perches on new landscapes, reconnoiter, connect a bit, and then retreat. Their pasts, destinations unto themselves, keep some secrets in these tales, secrets that urge the players (not all of whom have been dealt poor hands) to alternate strategy and always, always to hold back some cards. A good number of the alienated are mired in uncommitted relationships while casting about for comfort in their new habitats. Humor, satire and exquisite allusions illuminate lives largely free from the ties that bind. Expert at bundling the oddball with the ordinary, McGuane begets sojourners stalked by their own backgrounds as they stagger about in tales entitled “Aliens,” “Old Friends,” “The Zombie,” and “The Refugee.” One gem in the collection is “Miracle Boy,” wherein a teenager surveys the lives of his Irish immigrant grandparents and his American-born parents, aunts, uncles and cousins. With a canny eye, Johnny examines the array of vocations chosen by these people amid the social forces churning through their Massachusetts mill town during the 1950s. The withering compromises necessary for urban assimilation bear frightening similarities to those that confound relatives at a distance. Parents on the move steadily strew old traditions behind them (lightening the load?) and appear bewildered by their shriveling identities. An uncle, returning from a trip to Mother Ireland, “announced that the place was highly disorganized and insufficiently hygienic . . .” Immigrant forebears, those wary keepers of old ways that served up stability and custom, may not have been clean freaks, but they kept order and were steadied by procedure ” foundations of civility and safety. Speaking of his Irish-born grandmother, the boy states, “I even thought of our life in the Midwest, when I”d longed for her intervention in a family slow to invent rules for their new lives.” Struggling with conflicting advice from his elders, Johnny charges into “study of the Old West, a place where do-gooders and mad dogs alike lived free of ambiguity and insidious family tensions.” McGuane”s western stories will disabuse readers of such wishful thinking; however, this story”s wry humor may resonate particularly with those not completely at home in their present circumstances.Western stories set up new arrivals looking for opportunities after business failures, divorce and prison; others dream of peaceful retirement homes near children and grandchildren. Remarks from the chronically adrift chortle with irony as failures to launch new lives are stealthily linked to losses of ordinary conventions and old-fashioned ethics. Common social graces that usually serve people well during difficulties in faraway places are suspended, if not blotted out entirely in some instances. One Big Sky Country character reprogrammed himself to be just “a big believer in what he saw with his own eyes.” Hounded by persistent disruption, a few strivers in the West embrace a self-preservation sustained by earthy arrogance. Other odysseys find sullen, eco-touring, drug-using hippies, the bankrupt, a down-and-out cowboy, and an alcoholic sailboat enthusiast seeking fresh starts on terrain where, according to those in the Massachusetts Irish ghetto, “people made themselves up and were vaguely weightless.” Fraught with ambivalence about total immersion into their new settlements, the wayfarers often sulk within a self-imposed apartheid. In a couple of the stories, McGuane takes some swings at so-called “win-win” solutions for his seekers, suggesting that the very nature of negotiation creates losses all around. The author”s use of the past as a destination is steadily revisited and sometimes employs a symbol harking back to roots ” a tumble-down homestead, a pioneer cemetery, old buffalo wallows, a totem pole, John McCormack records (78s), even food. Displaced persons, dripping with disappointment and dismissive of their former abodes, fall back from time to time on steering mechanisms sparked by old times. Survivors they may be, yet most remain uneasy refugees in outlying limbos. Exhibiting the inhibitions and suspicions common to immigrants throughout the ages, the discontented sufferers in these road-trip sagas are unable to put things completely right. Endurance, rather than success, is their true essence. Thomas McGuane”s superb stories in GALLATIN CANYON pursue diasporas of the restless who, while shucking the husks of ancestral habits, forge onward, skittish about bearing personal history into new territory, and unaware that much of it is already mislaid, if not gone for good.Alfred A Knopf, A division of Random House, 2006, 220 pages, hardcover $24.00Mary McWay Seaman is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and is a contributing writer to “Gateway” magazine of St. Louis, Missouri, and to the “New Oxford Review” of Berkeley, California.

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Reviewed by Mary McWay Seaman,Celtic Connection, October, 2007
Folks who grew up during the Great Depression will not easily forget this book, and some New Yorkers may even feel themselves walking through its mirrors. Others will revere it as an aching refresher on the era. NORTH RIVER, Pete Hamill”s new novel, conducts readers through 1934 Greenwich Village near the North River (as the locals called the Hudson), where for many folks, hoping for heat and hot water was wishing for the moon. Sick at heart in the winter of his life, Dr. James Finbar Delaney, family physician, shoulders a grueling workload to block his despair. An injury in France during World War I, where he saw fellow soldiers cut to ribbons, had long banished Delaney”s dream of becoming a surgeon. Investigations into the strange disappearance of his dissatisfied wife drag on, and the couple”s impetuous daughter, a teen-aged bride, has left the country with a revolutionary young husband embroiled in overseas political rebellions. Hamill”s rich historical acumen summons a dark decade between world wars; a decade marked by global pauperism and growing overseas tyrannies that pushed multitudes into revolution and many towards nihilism.Few writers can transport readers to New York”s blighted, Depression-era streets with as much subtle, sensual veracity as Hamill. Delaney”s home medical practice near the river, “where he had listened to so many confessions without any hope of granting absolution,” occupies his mornings, while afternoons are devoted to house calls on foot or bicycle within warrens of decrepit tenements (anyone remember house calls?). The dangers faced when treating gangland foes ” hazards of his profession ” are constructed with the authority of a precise, journalistic hand. The narrative is crisp, and everyday conversations hum with authenticity. Nostalgia drips from the pages like a misty dew, but manages to skirt sentimentality.Delaney”s patients are afflicted with ailments and hardships that gnaw at each other with a sorrowful edginess. Injuries and diseases, from random sicknesses and savage accidents to grievous wounds from brawling and gunshot wounds, arrive at his door. Gangsters and gun-runners, military veterans and ordinary folks are treated for illnesses that would only be seen in specialty settings today ” tuberculosis, malaria, ills from tobacco and alcoholism, and cancer. The doctor attends to common complaints ranging from boils to shingles, but most people just waited out the usual childhood diseases and common respiratory ailments. The shame of penury is as visceral as the fear of hospitals before the development of antibiotics. Delaney”s patients, like much of the population in the 1930s, view the institutions as dumping grounds for hopeless cases. Hamill”s tough, newspaperman”s no-nonsense eye is at work in beholding the solitary, multi-tasking Samaritan whose accounts payable are never healed by his accounts receivable.When the doctor”s three-year-old grandson is abruptly deposited on his doorstep, life changes utterly. His daughter abandons the toddler to begin a search of Europe for her runaway spouse. The young husband”s dreams of glory require dramas with showy responsibilities and a new woman; he refuses to be foiled by the drag of family life. Folks in this novel are one of two kinds. Members of the first group, no matter where they are, want to be somewhere else and are suspended in wishful transit mode. The second group consists of those up to their elbows with life”s daily digging and hauling. Delaney”s wife, daughter, son-in-law and a mob patient are in the first category.Blindsided by love for his grandson, the doctor hires Rose, a scrappy Sicilian immigrant with a shaky past who organizes the household and soothes both suffering souls. All of the historic, literary, artistic and religious symbolism inherent in her name is excruciatingly correct. Her persona, a steadying tonic for Delaney”s sorrows, also provides an intriguing peek into the structural class system of the period. Reverence for President Roosevelt is palpable among the masses. The discipline of poverty has had its enthusiasts through the centuries, but there are no romantic notions about the nobility of privation in this book. Poor folks with poor ways – bugs, dirt, debilities and rotten teeth ” are on their own in the years before Social Security, welfare, food stamps, free school lunches, subsidized childcare and after-school camps. Private charities and churches offer some relief. Hamill gets in a few swings at the Catholic Church, but his measured hits are piercing and effective, usually in anecdotal asides, as he lets facts speak for themselves. His impression of religion as an anachronistic, monolithic bureaucracy rife with tribal, ritualistic bonds bearing strange fruit is furthered through the drama of a sports celebrity”s funeral (attended by John McCormack, George M. Cohan and Will Rogers), and the manipulation of another death certificate to circumvent the Church”s denial of burials for suicides (an injunction since rescinded).This enchanting saga is buoyed by a vortex of multilayered subplots awash with unexpected twists. A probing look at organized crime in the city, propelled by years of Prohibition, teases out some ethical dilemmas. Deft explorations of the enemies doctors sometimes make when their patients die comprise sobering tales, and one interlude exposes the dangers of submitting wound reports to law enforcement. Threading his way in and out of snares in the face of fearsome threats, Dr. Delaney sports a touch of swagger ” a perennial Pete Hamill feature in some portraits of his afflicted, almost too-good-to-be-true protagonists. Hamill”s exuberant love for the city he knows so well spills over in remembrance of hard times and unsung heroism. His genius in evoking the gritty, cold fog of Depression-era desperation lies in depictions of bewildered, workaday folks battling for their daily bread without fuss, fanfare or any grasp whatsoever of grand gestures. Most arrestingly, NORTH RIVER delivers an old soldier from hopelessness by addressing an elemental, ancient force – the heart”s desire to nurture and protect progeny, mankind”s lone, earthly fragment of immortality.