Something About the Irish

THE EDGE OF SADNESS (460 pp.)--Edwin O'Connor--Atlantic-Little. Brown ($5).

"Hail, hail, the gang's all here! Here's the last of the party, just arrived! And d'ye see who it is? Father Hugh Kennedy himself, come back to us just to say hooray to an old man on his birthday! Ain't that lovely? Ain't that grand? Come in, come in, Father Hugh! Come in here and say a grand hello to all the old friends! Look at them: they're leapin' around like salmon at the sight of you!"

The only one leaping is the speaker, Charlie Carmody, playing host at what he perversely insists is his 82nd birthday party--though he is really 81. Father Hugh Kennedy is hanging back for fear the rest of the party will regard him with the dead-cold eye of the Boston cod. Father Kennedy has been an alcoholic, and though it is five years since he last drank, everyone holds his breath until the errant priest refuses a proffered sherry. Between them, Charlie Carmody and Father Kennedy divide The Edge of Sadness, but do not dominate it. In his first book since The Last Hurrah, Novelist O'Connor signs countless lOUs on his people and plot, and redeems disappointingly few.

Parallel Lines. At first sight, Charlie Carmody seems to have the gusto of Frank Skeffington, the roguish politician (modeled on James Michael Curley) who ran away with the earlier novel. But Charlie dwindles into a gabby stage Irishman. Father Kennedy promises to be one of Graham Greene's degraded but tormented priests. Instead, his anguish is smothered in resignation, and his vocation is feeble. Compared with The Last Hurrah, this novel is a kind of lost begorra.

Since the Kennedy and Carmody stories run along parallel lines, they never properly meet. Charlie's story is essentially a rasping family chronicle faintly echoing the mood of Long Day's Journey Into Night. For all his comic-opera ways, Charlie Carmody is a gritty figure out of the immigrant past who clawed his way to wealth as a real estate operator. He can reminisce for hours on the joys of collecting, or extracting, the rent from hard payers. Charlie's son Hugh enters the priesthood, possibly in disgust at his father's tactics, but comes to hate his parishioners as much as he does his father, and dies of a hemorrhaging ulcer. Another son cravenly sponges off the old man. The eldest daughter becomes Charlie's spinster slave, while a spunkier daughter, Helen, marries a pompous doctor just to escape from the house.

Ordeal by Drink. Having spawned hate among the living, Charlie searches for love among the dead. With an old man's obstinacy, he insists that Hugh Kennedy's late father,was "my old pal" and the only person who ever loved him. All he wants from Father Kennedy is a crumb of assurance to feed his lonely vanity.

He gets it, but it is scarcely a plausible motivation for the book-length relationship between the two men. The ordeals of Father Kennedy's priesthood--"bleak moods" leading to compulsive drinking, as well as his rehabilitation--are equally unconvincing. Despite these lapses in motivation, Author O'Connor sympathetically conveys much of the priest's lot--the repetitions, the qualms, the drudgeries, the temptations, the loneliness, all adding up to a daily testing not glimpsed in the stereotypes of the Barry Fitzgerald-Bing Crosby order.

Cache sans Craft. A kind of nostalgic gallantry accounts for this whole maimed and meandering book. Author O'Connor is less concerned with the fates of Charlie Carmody and Father Kennedy than with the fate of the entire Irish-American community in an unnamed city that is obviously Boston. What he feels elegiac about is the death of a separate ethnic cultural identity. While he prizes the U.S. melting pot, he dreads the homogenized young American to whom a wake is about as dated as a brogue. And so he tries to capture not only the wakes but the tangy, smoky drift of Irish talk, the parochial Irish viewpoint that every historical event can be reduced to some Mrs. O'Leary's cow, and the fanciful delight in "Characters"--little Philsy Kerrigan, who once saved up a trunkful of doughnuts; Danny McGhee, who always slept in a maple tree; the midget policeman who caught the dwarf bandit.

Author O'Connor stores up these charming, nutty items like a squirrel, but unfortunately he lacks the craft for his cache.

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