Set in a modern-day coastal village in rural Ireland
and told mostly in dialogue— but through the eyes of a young man in between
high school and college—but more accurately a young man who is waiting,
who is in limbo, a young man who has experienced something hard and who can't
move on yet. For now, he works odd jobs, lives with his ma and da, is building
a wall, collecting lobsters from the traps, mowing lawns, talking to his
sort-of girlfriend (is she? isn’t she?), remarking on what the storms have
brought in ashore or uncovered. More importantly, he becomes friend and
caretaker to two old men—one a fiery neighbor called the Blackbird and one his
granduncle, Joejoe. What do these men do? Talk, drink, fight, remember. As he,
Philip, comes closer perhaps to the cusp of a new and different life, to
something that’s looming out there, to moving out of his limbo, they, the old
men (reminders of what he could/will become?), move closer to the cusp of
death.
The lack of a snappy plot, or what some might perceive
as a lack of "hard drama," might frustrate some readers—but that
sprinkling of fairy dust: the picaresque cast of characters (roustabouts,
rogues, misfits, ex-opera singers, hippies, Lithuanian and Polish émigrés,
eccentric artists, the German land owner, Japanese bird watcher, kids about
town, etc.) coming through—the music, art, and life and the way it all fits in together—will
delight others.
In that way it reminds me most of Cannery Row
or Cormac McCarthy's Suttree. Halfway between maybe a picaresque novel
and a bildungsroman: And maybe that’s where some of the inner tension of the
novel exists, and what might make it different than many other novels I’ve
read: Things happen, amazing things, every damn day and night, and they are
acutely observed—the winds gust, the seasons change, the earth changes, there
are fights, music, parties, wakes, work, food, etc.—but the characters aren’t
really seen to develop or change in response. I don’t know if anyone really
“comes of age”—even though it’s partly the story of the young man. Instead, there
are episodes, many many amazing episodes, and, over all that, a meditation.
And that's what it became to me. It
filled up a space in my life as I read it each evening before bed and in the
morning when I woke up—a meditation: a meditation on this book, a meditation on
larger life, and maybe just an act of meditating itself—cool brain waves
saying: this is being, this is being, this is being—a kind of mantra—the
reading and the writing, the story itself: all a meditation. And if it ends up
suiting your fancy, your temperament, whatever, if you make it through, back to
the end, it does leave you with something—the kind of thing that sticks to your
ribs: a very salty seaside humor, and maybe some salty tears, something both
time and place-bound and yet something surrounded by the eternal, something
both earthy and poetic, funny and sad: all sides of an embrace of everyday
life.
