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The suffering Irish | page 1, 2
The Kates and Babas in O'Brien's fiction have given birth to the likes of Nuala O'Faolain, author of the 1998 memoir "Are You Somebody: An Accidental Memoir of A Dublin Woman" and representative of the new Ireland -- a high-profile, well-educated, widely-traveled career women with assorted lovers, no children and a life in the city (usually London, certainly nothing less than Dublin). A journalist and TV producer, O'Faolain frames her book as the portrait of a young feminist, and she give us a sign of what the literature of a sleek, successful Ireland might be like. The vision is strangely dispiriting. Also Today America the brutal O'Faolain's story carries the reader through the last three decades of painful growth, from her early traumas trying to avoid pregnancy and getting sidetracked by a series of emotionally (and sometimes physically) violent affairs with men (with time out for a lesbian interlude)until the '90s, when O'Faolain discovers the joy and freedom of living alone, in her own house of splendid isolation (to borrow from a title of one of O'Brien's works). Yet after O'Brien's naked, wounded explorations of the female psyche, O'Faolain's personal story of New Age transcendence, while perhaps just the thing for today's Oprah Book Club audience, seems flat. Perhaps self-empowerment just doesn't have the resonance of artfully drawn pain. Not that the new Irish writing is entirely free from pain. Now, however it's a thoroughly modern form of suffering -- the kind of contemporary distress that can afflict anyone, anywhere. Flip through some recent Irish novels and you'll find the trials that afflict all humanity: domestic violence ("The Woman Who Walked Into Doors" by Roddy Doyle); fraternal loss ("Waiting for the Healer" by Eamonn Sweeney); sexual trauma ("Breakfast on Pluto" by Patrick McCabe); existential angst ("Crowe's Requiem" by Mike McCormack). These books present wrenching dilemmas but not ones that are particularly Irish. You're much more likely to read about chemical depression and alcoholism than abortion or living through a civil war. This isn't to say that these writers have neglected the tensions that arise when the new pushes up against the old. In "The Dead School," a recent novel by McCabe, a teacher who once considered joining the priesthood is riled by the new attitudes overtaking the forbidding provincial Catholic culture he has always cherished and considered the bedrock of his life. He sees himself, and the old Ireland that was his solace, being dragged into a future he's terrified by -- the future that I saw for myself when I was in Ireland. The well-dressed Dublin yuppies hanging out at the trendy film centers and restaurants make it clear that they have no time for the old troubles. The Catholic church, the British occupation, the IRA, poverty -- all the old sources of suffering have begun to fade, and national misery is becoming increasingly outmoded. The next generation of Irish writers will have to turn their attention to the problems that arise from inside the minds and hearts of a people who are now among the winners on this planet. Connoisseurs of the old style of misery must turn to the Albanians or the Serbs, depending on the events of any recent week. There seems to be no more Ireland for the Irish to escape from.
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