LIFE SENTENCES

Irish writer O'Callaghan dissects the trials and survival of a Cork family across several generations.

O’Callaghan’s previous novel, My Coney Island Baby (2019), looked at two married lovers facing a painful shift in their years of monthly trysts. Here his sharp pen digs through about 100 years of an Irish family’s life, using the voices of three members in as many major sections. In 1920, Jer is drinking heavily to feed the darkness brewing from his sister’s death and the blame he heaps on her husband. The police, fearing violence, keep him away from the funeral by putting him in jail. There, his thoughts turn to the Great War, the father he knew only in scattered visits, the destitution of his early life with his sister and mother. The Nancy section, from 1911, renders those early years from his mother’s point of view, centering on her affair as a young housemaid with a gardener and their two children, whom the father largely abandoned, condemning her to a grim term in the workhouse and prostitution. Last comes Jer’s daughter Nellie, whose life is winding down in 1982 and who recalls the death of her firstborn after just a few hours. In a memorable scene, she and her husband and father embark on a midnight prowl to the Catholic cemetery to bury the unbaptized infant against church rules. There, they meet and defy a priest in a concrete rejection of the church that echoes instances of shaky or absent faith elsewhere in the book. There’s much darkness in O’Callaghan’s "sentences." Even the title’s pun carries a shadow. Yet he writes with a bright, enlivening emotional palette and a penetrating eye for the details of family history—not least because he is tapping his own past, as the acknowledgements note.

A deeply felt and distinctive work by a real craftsman.