Steerage to Suburbia

All of these thoughts came back to me as I read The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O’Connor’s first major novel since The Last Hurrah in 1956. O’Connor is the archivist of those New England Irish Catholics who have made the uneasy three-generation journey from steerage to suburbia. Both outrageously funny and compassionately understanding, he has perceptively chronicled their struggles, customs and eccentricities. But the archivist faces the danger of forgetting his responsibilities as a novelist, a fact that places The Edge of Sadness in the ambivalent position of being a poor novel and yet a good book.

Despite promising materials, nothing happens in The Edge of Sadness. Action is advanced by reminiscence and by two characters talking of a third. Rather than dialogue, the characters speak paragraphs. Nevertheless, O’Connor has still written an absorbing book because he has brilliantly captured the parochialism of the still unassimilated Irish Catholic character. And in Ted O’Donnell, O’Connor witheringly and sadly sketches the product of assimilation.

JD

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John Gregory Dunne

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All of these thoughts came back to me as I read The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O’Connor’s first major novel since The Last Hurrah in 1956. O’Connor is the archivist of those New England Irish Catholics who have made the uneasy three-generation journey from steerage to suburbia. Both outrageously funny and compassionately understanding, he has perceptively chronicled their struggles, customs and eccentricities. But the archivist faces the danger of forgetting his responsibilities as a novelist, a fact that places The Edge of Sadness in the ambivalent position of being a poor novel and yet a good book.

Despite promising materials, nothing happens in The Edge of Sadness. Action is advanced by reminiscence and by two characters talking of a third. Rather than dialogue, the characters speak paragraphs. Nevertheless, O’Connor has still written an absorbing book because he has brilliantly captured the parochialism of the still unassimilated Irish Catholic character. And in Ted O’Donnell, O’Connor witheringly and sadly sketches the product of assimilation.