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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thank god someone reissued this book,
By Gulley Jimson (Bethesda, MD) - See all my reviews
This review is from: An Only Child (Irish Studies) (Paperback)
O'Connor is rightly famous mostly for his short stories, but his criticism - both The Lonely Voice and A Mirror In the Roadway - along with this volume of his memoirs, well, they're all just really good. I found this book in a library many years ago and there are a hundred scenes that still spring instantly to life, and sentences that are always going to be part of how I look at the world. He betrays his greatest talent in the fact that the book reads like a collection of wonderful chapters rather than a coherent whole, but each is filled with the spirit of a generous, funny, humane man, one of those rare authors that you wish you could hang out with. The people that assure that books keep getting read seem to be forgetting about O'Connor a little, but the pages they keep alive rarely seem to stay in the blood and brain like his do.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Archetypes: The Irish Mother vs. The Irish Father,
By Fulmoonmajik (Lexington, NC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: An Only Child (Irish Studies) (Paperback)
The contrast between the "mother" image and the "father" image as reflected within a particular culture and the subsequent effect of that contrast on the family dynamic add an interesting dimension to a childhood memoir. Although admittedly a generalization, the Irish mother as the strong, dependable, hard-working individual worthy of near sainthood in sharp contrast to her shiftless, abusive, self-pitying drunkard husband often appears in literary works written by Irish writers. There seems to me to be little argument that the veneration of the Irish mother figure is not surprising in a culture that typically holds the Virgin Mary in higher esteem than her son and that lovingly refers to its homeland as "Mother Ireland." Frank O'Connor's An Only Child offers such a contrast, one I find useful to my own writing since it reflects to a significant degree my own experience while growing up in an Irish Catholic household.
O'Connor sets up the contrast between the two extremes almost immediately, using his own personality as illustration, since, unavoidably, we are all products of our biological parents. O'Connor indicates that while he has the "passion for gaiety" as displayed by his mother, he is dismayed that he too often reacts the way of his "father's family, which was brooding, melancholy, and violent." He maintains that his mother married beneath her, despite the fact that it was his mother who grew up in an orphanage, and describes at great length how his father, "a naturally melancholy man," went on frequent drinking binges during which he would miss work, verbally abuse his family, and spend every cent at his disposal in the pubs while his wife and son nearly starved. O'Connor frequently refers to his embarrassment and disdain for this man whose warped self-image was of "a good man and kind father on whom everybody and everything turned" and went out of his way to avoid him whenever possible. The Irish father in this memoir somehow still has pride but it is a false, undeserving pride, just as his self-image as the martyr is false, the genuine martyr being his faithful, devoted, long-suffering wife. Unfortunately, the lack of a father deserving of his child's love and admiration results not only in the disillusioned child's greater dependence on the mother but also in a life-long search for and attachment to other men who become the "father figure" replacements. For O'Connor, the focus rests primarily (though not exclusively) on Corkery, a teacher, poet, and artist whom the narrator admires for "his gentle, fatherly way." As everything the biological father is not, Corkery, becomes the mentor, the "authority for everything," and loved because of "how well that gentle little man understood" his protege. In direct opposition to the Irish father, the Irish mother in An Only Child represents the ideal of both motherhood and womanhood and provides the strength to keep the family afloat. In a culture and during a time-frame when "(Irish) homes were matriarchies," the narrator turns to his mother for the love and approval his father withholds and, by doing so, only incurs greater wrath from his father. Insults of "sissy" and "Mother's Boy" are hurled at the child who even begins to identify himself as such. Naturally, the diametrically opposed mother and father frequently clash, but through it all, the mother (the true martyr) stoically attempts to bear the brunt of the neglect and abuse, stays with her abuser so her own child will not end up on the streets or in an orphanage, and "rarely asked anything for herself." The narrator's devotion to his mother becomes so strong that it is only well into his adulthood, and only at her death, that he "learned for the first time the meaning of parting and death." As the only child in such a volatile household, O'Connor frequently (even if silently) took sides, and it is not surprising, given the family dynamic (as well as the cultural veneration of the "Mother" figure), that his loyalty inevitably lay with his mother. Of course the ultimate choice (at least metaphorically) occurs when the narrator decides to forsake his father's surname in favor of his mother's.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Solid offering but sags slighty in the middle,
By
This review is from: An Only Child (Irish Studies) (Paperback)
Like Frank, I grew up Catholic, so I greatly enjoyed his account of his childhood and the deftness at which he relayed the characters and situations of his life in early 20th century Northern Ireland. The account of his father's alcoholism and mother's strength in her modesty evokes powerful sentiments that O'Connor is amazingly skilled at.
He overly criticizes the adolescent ideations and development out of his youth (bildungsroman), but it gives insight to his development as a writer (kunstlerroman), of which he is a candid and lucid artist. I felt the novel creeping a bit in the middle (otherwise I would give it 4 or 5 stars), and the transition is a bit murky to his engaging recount of actions against the British occupation of Northern Ireland and surrounding religious strife. The ridiculous skirmishes and characters are painted with his masterful brush, however, and truly bring the era to life. It is a story worth the read to the end on many levels.
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