The Irish in America are almost as subjected to cliche and stereotyping as are Americans in Ireland - not forgetting, of course, that the plaid trousered-wearing Yank strolling our streets is, more often than not, a returned Irishman. The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, a sequel of sorts to Season at Coole, is a determined attempt to chronicle the gritty, sub-human existence of an Irish American clan living in East New York. No stereotype has been left out, no sin unrecorded; all relationships have been reduced to brutal wars of attrition.
Most of the loud, angry characters are either drunks, or are unstable, or both; they are all losers, violent beyond belief or energy and are uniformly on the run from their family and from themselves. Even the daughter who is a nun has had an affair with another woman as well as a priest. Sex, alcohol, tormented parent-child relationships, as well as ordinary human hatreds, dominate the story - are the story. Ironically, the most interesting aspect of this work, which is arranged in five, repetitive and cluttered acts, is that Stephens could have so many powerful themes to hand and, due to a near complete absence of narrative technique, could fail to use any of them effectively.
The 16 unhappy children of Leland Coole - an aggressive patriarch better known in his tough neighbourhood as Jackie Ducks ("the dirty Irish bastard. Poor old dead bastard. Poor Dad") - gather for his funeral. No tears are shed.
As the old man lies in his coffin, his offspring could hardly be described as heartbroken. In fact, it is showtime and the ideal situation for trading horror stories about dear old Dad. This is the father who once put his son's loudly miaowing cat in a freezer and then forgot about it; a father who beat most of his children at some time or other.
As a portrait of cultural confusion it is certainly graphic, if too concerned with extreme, abusive behaviour to emerge as more than an exercise in raw story-telling of the most brutal form. There is also the serious problem that the narrative voice and that of the characters are virtually one and the same. It is bewildering to note as fine a writer as Russell Banks describing this novel as "classical in form, Celtic in language and Brooklyn-American in content". The dialogue sounds as if it were written for the most turgid of television dramas, to be performed by actors convinced that shouting equals emotion. By the way, if there is a reason for spelling Celtic as `Keltic' it passed me by.
FIRST published in the US in 1994, The Brooklyn Book of the Dead seems to be setting out to achieve lofty objectives. A sense of individuals caught between cultures is never established. Aside from providing an excuse for appalling behaviour, Ireland does not exist for these people. It can't; they are too embroiled with their family disputes and old resentments. There is no lightness, no humour, the prose is strained, expletive-ridden and says surprisingly little.
The book's anger is monotonous. Compared with the Cooles, the Simpsons seem more civilised than the Waltons. Stephens believes in "straight between the eyes" to such an extent that by the end of narrative, which should have brought readers to their knees, the only reaction is `so what?' He wants to shock, perhaps even offend. Whether he achieves either of these aims depends on whether a reader chooses to apply moral judgements to fiction. Personally I don't - still I did find it very difficult to accept that any 16-year-old boy, when left to sponge down his teenage sister, who lies in bed complete with "a training bra" would, this side of a psychiatric ward, set about shoving marbles into her vagina. It also strains belief to then be faced with the description of these marbles falling from her body as she passes urine. Whatever about the ugly, relentless brutality of the jagged narrative, the fact is that Stephens repeatedly fails to convince because the shared experience of his characters, as well as their voices, are devoid of variation. The episodic narrative reads as a creaking sequence of stories linked by the wake, and also of course by the fact it concerns members of one family. Stephens's style is theatrical, posturing in its extremes, and clumsily ever reaching for literary effect. This novel is also burdened by the fact it sounds so much more American in tone than Irish. On the cover of the US edition, comparisons with Eugene O'Neill and James T. Farrell are made. Among the glowing endorsements is a reference to its dismantling of the American Dream - the narrative is far too one-dimensional to do that - aside from the fact that many, far more subtle writers than Stephens have long since done this.
Even as a social history of East New York's ghetto world it fails, despite its evocation of the various nationalities and races represented in the immigrant settlement, because the statements are invariably caught up with the characters, their bodies, their faces, their vicious outpourings. While many would argue that it is time the Irish experience was explored realistically rather than romantically, one can not help wondering if the new interest in The Brooklyn Book of the Dead and its recent Irish publication have been generated more by the sensationalised success of Frank McCourt's hyped memoir, Angela's Ashes, than any individual merits?
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist
