Inspired by westerns and stories told by the “returned Yanks” scattered around late 1950s rural Ireland, Fintan Doherty sets out for America a few years after the death of his mother. He “embarks on a lifelong western grá” that leads him to “circle an entire continent” like a Donegal Kerouac passing through the lives and loves of vibrant, technicolour characters along the way, physically if not emotionally abandoning the bracken-covered hills and small cottages of the auld sod for interstates and baseball games and postcards of an America that people might still cherish today but which, perhaps, never truly existed.
The result is an engrossing coming-of-age tale and, as it builds, profoundly affecting.
There is a wistful, fittingly old-fashioned feel to the storytelling here, often verging on the melancholic but never staying in the same place long enough to be weighed down by it. The author executes this through prose that is quiet and intimate like someone telling you their life story in a cosy pub.
Way Out West absorbs the reader’s attention the way such a tale might and, without noticing, pages and years of Doherty’s life flicker past as he drifts through the 1970s and ‘80s, through girlfriends and drinking buddies, and through towns and cities that are “all non-stop, everything in motion” whirls of Americana.
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Never travelling in a straight line, he washes up first in Cleveland, then onwards to St Louis where he takes a job with social services, then Wisconsin where he works shortchanging punters at a neon-hued carnival, onward to Butte with its storied history of Irish labourers and eventually to California. Always Doherty is the everyman emigrant, relying on his accent to get work in Irish bars, taking “car wash, cashier, night watchman” jobs for rent money when he can, and always staying just ahead of the emptiness within himself.
It is in that unspoken, arguably unspeakable search for identity that Way Out West defines itself. Because something has always been missing for Doherty, something rooted in the opening 60 pages about his childhood in the glen. And though it takes him a lifetime to reach it, the destination, when he arrives, does not just justify the journey, it offers serenity to the wanderer and the reader alike.
