Wanted: Irish Editor

Mortal Friends By James Carroll Little, Brown, 607 pp., $10.95 Has it really been 22 years since Edwin O’Connor’s Last Hurrah, that picaresque novel of Boston Irish political intrigue? Everyone recognized O’Connor’s fictional Skeffington as the actual and irrepressible James Michael Curley. After The Last Hurrah added a phrase to the American vocabulary, it was possible in Boston to look at Curley with a certain amount of amused detachment instead of the old Yankee hatred. Also, the book was very funny.

A comparison between The Last Hurrah and James Carroll’s Mortal Friends is, I suppose, inevitable. Carroll on the indomitable Boston Irishry is heavier, in some instances less plausible, and lacking O’Connor’s engagingly impish touch. He has nevertheless set down the Boston political world and underworld with extended research and grim determination. Irish-American he is. Yet from the evidence of his book I should say that Boston is not his birthright. His guide-book knowledge of the city impresses me as being acquired rather than inherited. Unlike O’Connor, he uses actual names for actual persons among his fictional characters. Curley is Curley, the late Cardinal Cushing is his chthonic bibulous self, Joe Kennedy is Joe Kennedy, Jack and Bobby Kennedy are themselves or slightly more than themselves, Governors Hurley and Fuller are there, as, overseas, are de Valera and Michael Collins.

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Francis Russell

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Mortal Friends By James Carroll Little, Brown, 607 pp., $10.95 Has it really been 22 years since Edwin O’Connor’s Last Hurrah, that picaresque novel of Boston Irish political intrigue? Everyone recognized O’Connor’s fictional Skeffington as the actual and irrepressible James Michael Curley. After The Last Hurrah added a phrase to the American vocabulary, it was possible in Boston to look at Curley with a certain amount of amused detachment instead of the old Yankee hatred. Also, the book was very funny.

A comparison between The Last Hurrah and James Carroll’s Mortal Friends is, I suppose, inevitable. Carroll on the indomitable Boston Irishry is heavier, in some instances less plausible, and lacking O’Connor’s engagingly impish touch. He has nevertheless set down the Boston political world and underworld with extended research and grim determination. Irish-American he is. Yet from the evidence of his book I should say that Boston is not his birthright. His guide-book knowledge of the city impresses me as being acquired rather than inherited. Unlike O’Connor, he uses actual names for actual persons among his fictional characters. Curley is Curley, the late Cardinal Cushing is his chthonic bibulous self, Joe Kennedy is Joe Kennedy, Jack and Bobby Kennedy are themselves or slightly more than themselves, Governors Hurley and Fuller are there, as, overseas, are de Valera and Michael Collins.