The Divine Ryans [Paperback]

Wayne Johnston (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 1999

From the author of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, "An absolute stunner--achingly funny, needle-sharp, and packing an unexpected wallop...the literary equivalent of a small-budget movie masterpiece with heart, soul, and brains"(Time Out).

The Ryans of St. John's, Newfoundland, are a large and deeply eccentric Irish-Catholic family in the dual business of newspaper-publishing and undertaking--"one-hundred years of digging up dirt of one kind or another," as Uncle Reginald puts it. Enough Ryans also become priests and nuns to earn them the sobriquet "Divine."

The youngest member of the family is nine-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan, whose passion for the Catholic Montreal Canadiens in their battles against the Protestant Toronto Maple Leafs is matched only by his perplexity over his recently deceased father's regular reappearances, hockey puck in hand, in the house next door. How he comes to make sense of these visitations, his gently screwy relatives, and his own burgeoning sexuality forms the matter of this droll, wise, and effortlessly funny coming-of-age novel.

Soon to be a major motion picture from the producer of Love and Death on Long Island, and starring Oscar®-nominee Pete Postlethwaite.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nine-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan, sole male heir to the once-venerable Ryan name, seems an unlikely family savior. Harried by his own frantic hormones, flustered by his many insufficiencies, and beset by a cadre of oppressive relatives, about the only defense he has is an endlessly inventive imagination. It's a fine line between coming-of-age sentimentality and gratuitous high jinks Wayne Johnston walks in his pleasing novel The Divine Ryans; the result--a snapshot of that twilight between childhood befuddlement and mature disillusionment--is unexpected and deft.

Draper Doyle's life in Newfoundland, circa mid-1960s, is as constrained as it is colorful. Cooped up in one house with various family oddballs, he views the world from the bottom rungs of the ladder. Perpetually harangued by the frigid and imperious Aunt Phil (whose powers of humiliation reach their apex when she displays a pair of his urine-stained underwear on the kitchen bulletin board), and browbeaten by one smarmy, perverse uncle, Father Seymour, the boy retreats into consoling fantasy, fretful ruminations, and the friendship of his only ally, irreverent Uncle Reginald. When Phil employs a weary argument to shame Draper Doyle into finishing a meal, Reginald wonders aloud if bulletins were "being sent to the poor people of South America by the hour, keeping them up to date about what percentage of their food children of the Western world were eating." Draper Doyle is also haunted--literally--by the ghost of his father, a mystery whose painful resolution almost miraculously offers deliverance to both him and his mother.

What is most gratifying about The Divine Ryans is that it moves so effortlessly from the comic to the bittersweet, from the madcap to the revelatory. Johnston's Twainesque aptitude transmutes drollness and hyperbole into something larger: out of his young hero's absurd comic tangles, we sense a subject slowly grasping not only the shortcomings of those who love him, but also their many travails. The book's divine. --Ben Guterson

From Publishers Weekly

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Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 215 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; 1st Broadway Books ed edition (August 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385495447
• ISBN-13: 978-0385495448
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,007,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unexpected Divinity, June 16, 2000

By 

Christiana Molldrem (New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Divine Ryans (Paperback)

I found this book quite intriging. In the spirit of "American Beauty", it is a tale about a dysfuntional family. It is told as almost a bitter sweet memoir of a real person's childhood in Newfoundland in the 1960's. You learn to dislike and like the different characters in the childs eyes and see how his divine family has truely fallen from grace. The characters in the book that should be the most devout and true are the most ignorant and irritating, these people being the preist and nun in the family. The leader of their Irish-Catholic, you could almost say cult, is the aunt of Draper Doyle (the young child). She is the most nauseating character I have yet to come across. She is filled with Hipocrisy and all the things that she is against. She also threatens the safty of Draper Doyle's newly widowed mother. Their entire future depends on Draper Doyle's recognization of his nightmares which cause him unbelievable embarassment in the face of his relative. His only refuge from his devout aunts and uncles is his uncle reginald who is one of the most endearing and genuinly funny characters I have come across. This book is fantasticly written (unlike this review, I have need of spell check) and keeps your attention from one paragraph to the next which is always a Divine thing in a book.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This is a terrific read; great characters and very funny., November 8, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Divine Ryans (Mass Market Paperback)

If you are Canadian, know anything about hockey or love oddball families, you will enjoy this book. It is the touching story of the Ryan's, a Catholic family in Newfoundland who run the local Catholic newspaper. The trials and secrets of this lovely bunch of nuts, as seen through the eyes of their youngest member, is a truly memorable story.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Great Canadian author, September 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Divine Ryans (Paperback)

This book was pure enjoyment. A great read and never disappointing. Very different from Colony of Unrequieted Dreams. I feel as I have found an author that I will able to follow for years to come.