Customer Reviews

A Way of Life, Like Any Other (New York Review Books Classics)

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Darcey O'Brien's fine Bildungsroman is a very funny and lethal depiction of a golden Hollywood childhood which begins to tarnish as his parents' careers do. The narrator's parents--a histrionic former screen beauty obsessed with sex and a former Western star of amiable disposition but sometimes hidden motives--unconsciously (and even sometimes consciously) wreak all kinds of havoic in their son's life, but as he gets older the son begins to fight back in covert ways. This was exactly the kind of book that the NYRB series was created to revive: a funny and poignant novel of sterling quality that somehow slipped through the cracks of readers' attention years ago and deserves a new chance.

Darcy O'Brien combines the surreal humor of Flann O'Brien and the limpid prose of the young James Joyce and somehow writes a coming of age book which transcends both mentors in some ways. Lean, cool, dry, witty, but in the end, mysteriously poignant. Anthony Powell always argued that seen at close range all human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same furies, are equally extraordinary. O'Brien proves Powell's point, in prose reminscent of that master's early comic novels.

In his introduction to this reissue of a novel first published in 1977, Seamus Heaney dwells on Darcy O'Brien's Irishness (comparing him to Joyce and Flann O'Brien) and ponders how one might attempt to describe the book: "Autobiographical novel, fictionalized memoir: whether we regard the book as 'cri de coeur' or comic turn..."

O'Brien's Irish heritage seems beside the point (must every Irish American writer be placed against Joyce and Flann O'Brien?), but this is, indeed, a work that skirts the line between fact and fiction. Heaney's literary acumen aside, this is also a very American book--more specifically a highbrow model of that lowest of middlebrow fiction, the Hollywood novel. More germanely to the author, it is a raw, impassioned, and surprisingly tender ode to his parents--a pair of has-been, real-life film stars down on their luck and at odds with each other. Finding humor (both lighthearted and morbid) amid relative misery, "A Way of Life" is far more a precursor to the confessional works by the likes of David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, and Jeannette Walls than a successor to early-twentieth-century Irish fiction.

Hollywood has never been shy about laughing at itself; readers will recognize many of the central-casting players depicted here, along with the shallow pretensions of the jet set. But O'Brien's succinct, disarmingly blunt prose places his book a cut above the norm--even his caricatures are fully drawn with the briefest of scenes: the ego-driven producer with an out-of-control gambling addiction, his permissive wife whose major concern is that her own daily horse-racing allowance might suffer as a result, their unrestrained and oversexed adolescent son, a pompous salesman of trendy foodstuffs (in the 1950s, those would include, hilariously, avocadoes), a flighty car dealer who peddles John Birch Society tracts along with his automobiles. Adding to the book's authenticity are cameos by real people, including John Ford, who in life directed O'Brien's father in several movies and who in fiction is portrayed as a gentlemanly mentor who graciously meets with his hapless former leading man.

But the real "stars" of the novel are O'Brien's parents. The unnamed narrator's charmed, pampered early life is ripped apart when his parents split and their finances suffer. His mother flits from one abusive or inappropriate replacement to another; his father refuses to accept their estrangement: "Your Mother and I are still married in the eyes of the Church." Their son first lives with his mother, then with his father, and finds that they both have become uproariously and painfully impossible. Eventually, he moves into a friend's expansive and expensive home and discovers that all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way, but it's to O'Brien's credit that he is able to make this journey both comical and heartrending at the same time.

Reading A Way of Life Like Any Other was such an unexpected pleasure. Time after time I have believed good reviews from sources one used to respect and bought a book, only to find that the writing was mediocre at best. This time I was thrilled to discover really brilliant writing: living characters, marvelous humor and not one superfluous sentence. A writer as rare as O'Brien should be celebrated.

The writing here is so filled with generosity, compassion, and dark humor -- it's a most charming view of life. A coming-of-age novel about a boy who grows up in post-WW II Hollywood, shuffling between unforgettable, screwed-up parents. There's not a dead sentence here. It's short, but O'Brien captures it all. Completely re-readable. Keep it by your bedside to inspire and forgive your own life when you feel like it's trying to beat you down.

This is a MUST. Indeed it is Caulden Houlfield in Hollywood. If you like Catcher in the Rye, most likely you will love this book. It really is a great story with some great humor.

A wonderous book which evvelips the mind of a child reared by ext movie star parents. This novel is a witty (sublime) and sadly delicate tale. yadadadadaddadada. read it. add it to yr LA fiction list.