Ring Around the Rosary

FARRAGAN'S RETREAT by Tom McHale. 311 pages. Viking. $6.95.

The old motto, "Power perfected becomes grace," could have been invented to describe Tom McHale's novels about Irish and Italian Catholics in America. Humor is his forte--not satire but farce. No aberration is too grotesque to be included, no character too minor to be lampooned. McHale's comedy waves over chaos like luxuriant grass over a grave.

There are many young writers with healthy reserves of rage and chaos, some indeed with little else. What distinguishes McHale is not only the fertility of his invention but the humanity--remarkable in a writer of 28--that penetrates even his crudest caricatures.

Like the eponymous hero of McHale's first novel, Arthur Farragan is a man brought low by his very decency. Instinctively he is a lover rather than a hater, a fairminded, trusting man and an indulgent father. Despite superficial pragmatism, he never quite cracks the code that relentlessly governs life around him: that the truth is always the opposite of what it appears to be. For Farragan every encounter ends in shock; every shock releases in the author an almost Dickensian, genial savagery.

Farragan's main misfortune is his family, a pious, prejudiced, patriotic Philadelphia clan, grown rich in trucking. Sister Anna keeps her pistol--carried as protection against black rapists--wrapped in a rosary. Brother Jim echoes her thundering rage through his favorite weapon, the telephone. Behind them looms the memory of Mother--who railroaded one son into the priesthood and choreographed the death of another because he showed homosexual leanings.

Trouble starts when Arthur's son Simon skips to Canada to avoid the draft. A committed member of the counterculture, Simon has already earned the clan's enmity by sending a condolence letter to Ho Chi Minh at about the same time that Anna's boy was killed in Viet Nam. As retribution, Arthur is told to fly to Montreal and shoot his son. He has no intention of doing so, but out of cowardice makes the trip. On his return he is astonished to learn that Anna has been blown up by a bomb.

From this point the plot moves at a gallop, but it is really only a stalking-horse for the author's polished mockery and his gallery of fantastics. Catholicism corrupts, he clearly thinks, and churchliness corrupts absolutely. Every plot, from Anna's murder to Arthur's adultery, has priestly blessing. Farragan's ultimate betrayer, his wife, is a seemingly saintly lady who spends her passion on canonization drives for violated virgins.

McHale is somewhat more indulgent, when lampooning the fear and prosperous conventionality of middle age. Even Arthur, the only wholly human member of his family, has "two Cadillacs, two homes and safe money in Swiss banks." His friend, the mobster Serafina, has a yacht as well. Serafina is a fine parody of the Godfather. Trailed ceaselessly by the feds, he cheerfully gives their car a push when the batteries go dead. When he reads of the violence in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, he personally guards Philadelphia's Liberty Bell on the theory that no judge is going to be tough on the man who saved the ring of freedom.

Farragan is a deeper, more generous creation than Principato, which came out just eight months ago. The author's next book, too, will be about rich, middle-aged man under siege, a subject that McHale researched during several summers as a waiter in the Poconos. He grew up in Scranton, Pa., the eldest of six children, and attended Jesuit schools and Temple University. Now he lives in Vermont, which he calls "the last frontier in the east." He intends to keep up the writing pace as long as he has something to say, and he is fatalistic about how long that may be. It is foolhardy to predict a young writer's future, but if burgeoning energy and imagination count, McHale's rich shanty Irish may be around as long as Faulkner's Snopeses.

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