I've never slept with anybody in the same bed in my whole life.'”Īs the flashbacks come and go, we begin to see the dead hand of the Farragans’ mother shoving their lives about.

‘I'm 47 years old and I've never been to bed with a woman. Although loyal Farragan, prepared to acquiesce in the killing of Simon, Edmund feels life has passed him by: “'I'm tired of being priest,’ Edmund raged, tears filling his eyes. Arthur returns to the monastic retreat run by his other brother, Edmund, a priest who likes to go out drinking with the boys. Eventually, he makes it to Montreal where Simon is living with a hippie girl Simon allows that might be nice to be killed, thus giving the antiwar movement a suitable martyr. Arthur, of course, has no intention of executing Simon, b la Abraham, and plans rather to warn his son of Anna and Jim's malevolent intentions. Off to a bang‐up beginning, then, the novel moves forward lickety‐split, a curious blend of the comic and the violent. Anna is convinced she's going to be raped by a black man some day and keeps a pistol, wrapped in her rosary beads, in her purse at all times. Obviously, such a son cannot be allowed to live and the fanatical Anna has Arthur taking target practice in her basement where she has a silhouette target painted to look like a Negro. What Anna and Jim are incensed about is Simon's lack of the proper chauvinistic patriotism about the time his cousin is killed fighting in Vietnam, Simon writes letter of condolence to Ho Chi Minh. This killing is conveniently kept in the family-a ritual sacrifice as it were. Arthur Farragan, a decent middle‐of‐the‐road Roman Catholic, and his bigoted brother and sister, Jim and Anna, form a pact to kill Arthur's son, Simon, a long‐haired draft‐dodging hippie. Once again we are plunged into the obsessed, tragicomic lives of a group of Irish‐Americans.

McHale is staking himself out a nice plot of American literary acreage. In this very space John Leonard hailed “Principato” as “a comic novel in what I hope will become the McHale tradition.” With the appearance of his second novel, “Farragan's Retreat,” it becomes obvious that the McHale tradition is indeed a lively one and that Mr. Lonigan” or Edwin O'Connor's novels -not to mention the city of Philadelphia, where the book was set, a place, according to the canard, that whenever you go there it is closed. It was also widely noted that at last a neglected group in America, the Irish, had been accorded a voice they had not had since James T.

The comparisons to Roth, Updike and Bruce Jay Friedman flew from reviewers’ typewriters as thick as mayflies in July. About a year ago a young Philadelphia writer named Tom McHale came out with a novel called “Principato,” which was promptly hailed as revealing a remarkable new talent.

Farragan's Retreat by Tom McHale