Sleepwalker of the Spirit

THE HUNGRY GRASS by Richard Power. 288 pages. Dial. $5.95.

Failure is the Irishman's specialty act.

No one else fails with such devastating charm, with such splendid success. Of all the failed Irishmen, none carries down the broken standard of his race more convincingly than the failed Irish priest. Dublin Novelist and Playwright Richard Power has written a funny, rueful little classic about the last days of 63-year-old Father Conroy, whose sudden dying is less a natural act than a winsome acknowledgment of his own obsolescence--and perhaps that of his country as well.

Father Conroy is that saddest of all alienated creatures, a man half in step with his times. Both as a man of God and a man of Ireland, he lacks vocation. He has little use for the fuddy-duddy reactionaries of Irish Catholicism, but he is almost equally unsympathetic to the new-style, gogo, golf-club-toting young priests buoyed up by their faith in sociology. Outside of the church, Father Conroy hardly knows which to despair of more--the ignorant Irish peasants whom he loves, or the smooth, gray-suited men of the future whom he fears justly for their visions of superhighways spanning the land for the greater glory of the tourist industry.

Conroy subsists in a pale no-man's-land between faith and apostasy--between the 19th century to which he cannot return and the 20th century to which he cannot adapt. In a scene of lovely irony, he sits in a barber's chair fascinated by a U.S. western on TV, while, in the next room, a dying old man struggles to remember half-forgotten lines of Gaelic song.

Impelled by premonitions of his own death, the priest revisits his childhood home and pays calls on relatives he has not seen in years. Most of them belong among the Irish categories of the spiritually dead. His sister, characteristically, after one memorable lovemaking holiday, lovelessly married another man and has lived out her life as anticlimax.

Assessing his life, Father Conroy sees that he has been a sleepwalker among sleepwalkers, mending, patching, temporizing with a world that has been deteriorating as inexorably as his body. Playing priest like a character part, he has simply avoided living, allowing Ireland's failure elitists--the drunks, the loafers--to recognize in him their kindred spirit. He has not even been able to fail grandly. The one rebel he has deliciously identified with, a protege who once ran away with the canon's silver, has ended up by becoming a trivial middle-aged success in America.

Without a false drop of sentimentality, the author lets Father Conroy die as he lived: an absurd misfit. Power can afford the risk, and not just because he is so brilliantly in control of his story. In his Irish bones, he knows something that many writing contemporaries do not understand: that failure is, in fact, the natural state of man. Converting chronic self-pity into the beginnings of self-awareness, Power proves himself, if not quite a tragedian, at least a master alchemist at producing final honor from final defeat.

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