The Bend For Home

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 2 MAR 1998

Novelist and poet Healy has produced not a memoir, as claimed, but an episodic novel in the form of a memoir. Writers, he contends, "not only make up things, but get things wrong as well. Language, to be memorable, dispenses with accuracy." That explains Healy's strategy, which includes confessions later dismissed as inventions. Still, improvements on his memories of life in Irish villages in the 1950s and 1960s do make for a sprightlier book. "It annoys me to remember those days," he writes, while relentlessly remembering them in his fashion. Healy's lengthy dialogues are clearly novelistic, and his accounts, sometimes explicit, of randy teenagers, lascivious priests and ill and dying elderly villagers, although cliches of Irish autobiography, are given freshness here. The slender narrative thread is the slow disintegration of Healy's father, a policeman retired for failing health. A long epilogue evokes the equally miserable death of the author's mother when Healy is already acquiring a reputation as a writer. The usual suspects are rounded up--poverty, hypocrisy, loneliness, failure, nostalgia, laughter, dreams, drink, death. As Healy owns up, "Those who had been there told all that happened to those who had not. And we exaggerated all we'd seen. As I am doing here, and not for the first time." FYI: Healy's novel A Goat's Song will be published simultaneously in paperback by Harvest.