THE peg for Joseph O'Connor's travels through Irish America a profile of nine towns called Dublin in nine different states might have been better suited to a 4,000 word feature for a glossy magazine, complete with quirky photographs. O'Connor says as much himself, on page 318, when he finds himself deep in the heart of rural Texas "I was tired of arriving in towns called Dublin, looking for spurious Irish American connections, so I decided to abandon this approach and just start enjoying myself." Not a minute too soon.
As you may have guessed, none of the nine Dublins offer much by way of startling new insights into either Irish America or small town American life, although with characteristic humour, O'Connor does his best to cajole every librarian and would be local historian into digging up some rattling good Irish bones. When this fails, he relies on an endless succession of one liners as well as random encounters with waitresses, cashiers, chamber maids, bartenders, fellow travellers, truculent teenagers, taxi drivers. But to little avail. The last chapter finds our weary hero in Dublin, California "When you arrive there, you cannot help wondering why you bothered." The reader, understandably, shares his frustration.
O'Connor is clearly a city boy, and he is at his most exuberant in Boston and New York, Atlanta, Memphis and Nashville. So while the book is constructed around the task of finding and fleeing from these mean little Dublin towns, his verve is restored each time he returns to the centre of things. An affectionate week spent with his father Sean, mostly in New York City, becomes an internal journey, and here the book is at its most charming.
Equally, whenever he encounters music a George Thorogood concert in Massachusetts, soul music in the Rum Boogie Cale in Memphis, a three hour gospel service in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta his spirits soar and so does his writing. In fact, the happiest, most informed passages in the book relate to music, following in the spirit of Bringing It All Back Home. Here he makes the most of the Irish American connection.
Landscape clearly intimidates him and he seems haunted by travel writers who have gone before him he mentions Kerouac, Chatwin, Raban, among others. Thus, rather abruptly, he gives up trying to describe the Grand Canyon "Look, for God's sake, it's almost as big as Camille Paglia's ego, right?" The Blue Ridge mountains "They really are blue and they really have ridges . . ." Texas "The first thing that strikes you about Texas is that it is big. I knew everybody tells you that, but it really really is. It's massive .. It's enormous. It's as big as something really incredibly big and then some ...
On the subject of Irish American history, he avoids any epic historical statements, using extracts from emigrants' letters instead to speak for themselves at the start of each chapter. Although he is clearly engaged by the plight of early emigrants and fascinated by the determined rise of the Irish from ward politics through to the corridors of Washington, he never speaks to anyone directly about the Irish contribution to US politics, business or culture, referring only to books he has read along the way. A few sparkling, articulate interviews would not have gone astray.
Well known Irish Americans James Michael Curley, Cardinal O'Connell, Honey Fitz etc have their stories retold. He writes knowingly of the legacy of Al Smith, whose failed presidential campaign nonetheless forged links between the Irish and the Jews, making way for the New Deal and the liberal elite.
As for JFK, O'Connor dispenses with him in three pages, using a brief visit to Dallas as a pretext. Suspicious of heroes, crusaders and easy idealism he warns "It is an even sadder reality that the supposedly last great hope of liberal Irish America turned out to be a gifted but damaged and ultimately dangerous man who evidently countenanced political assassinations and the brutal murder of millions with nuclear weapons... The sooner Irish America comes to terms with that, the sooner it will come to terms with itself." There is no index in the book, but there is a fine historical bibliography.
O'Connor clearly set himself a difficult, solitary task. When Jonathan Raban wrote that most splendid book, Old Glory, for example, the Mississippi provided a single focal point for his discoveries. In Sweet Liberty, however, O'Connor is charting a vast and seemingly unresearched territory in places as diverse as Georgia and New Hampshire, Texas and Maryland. What's more, the project appears to have taken weeks rather than months, making it all the more formidable.
In California, for example, he writes that he tried to visit Dublin Prison, where "that infamous former junk bond big wig" Michael Milken was jailed for two years. Now that would have made good copy. But like too much of this book, such a visit wasn't set up in advance, his credentials couldn't be cleared in time, so he walks away from the idea, "attempting to find something interesting".
Too many waitresses, too many hangovers, too many crummy hotels, roadside cafe's, bad burgers, dirty laundry and other vestiges of dirty realism revisited, not to mention an overdose of scatological one liners. And clearly not enough guidance from his editor, who should have demanded more of this very popular writer.