Books: Off Form

ALL IN THE FAMILY by Edwin O’Connor. 434 pages. Atlanfic-LiMie, Brown. $6.95.

With each new book he writes, any conscientious author tries to surpass his best previous performance. In the case of Edwin O’Connor, his best previous performance was The Last Hurrah (TIME, Feb. 13, 1956), an unforgettable portrait of an Irish politician doomed, like the torchlight procession, to extinction. O’Connor’s next two novels, The Edge of Sadness and I Was Dancing, fell progressively short of Hurrah’s high mark. All in the Family falls shorter still.

In format, Family is like every other O’Connor book. The scene is a place very much like Boston and the Irish-Catholic community—bounded by faith, politics and new money—that O’Connor has explored so often before. On his trip, however, he has no clear idea where he wants to go, except that his :amily should resemble the Kennedy clan only in the most superficial aspects. The book drifts in two unsynchronized directions. One leads past Jimmy Kinsella, a second-generation Irish Croesus who has prodded his youngest son Charles into the Governor’s mansion and then sits by, fulminating helplessly, as the family splits over the hoariest of issues: political realism v. political idealism. O’Connor’s solution is resourceless and unbelievable: Governor Charles, the realist, has his brother Phil, the idealist, committed to an insane asylum. The story is narrated by Jimmy’s nephew, Jack Kinsella, who supplies the book’s other direction. Jack’s wife Jean has run off to Europe with a cad, but later returns to his side. Reunited, Jack and Jean visit Ireland, where the book comes to a happy ending: Jean conceives.

Family resounds too often with the kind of noise that substitutes for ideas and action. It is laden with superlatives: “the most comfortable house I have ever been in in my life,” “the most uncomfortable interval of my life,” “the most grown-up boy of around my age I had ever met”—and with synthetic velocity: “Suddenly, another letter came,” “Suddenly I knew.” Loyal readers will suddenly feel that this novel is not O’Connor at his best.