Customer Reviews

There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History

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There are scholars and there are critics, and then there are enthusiasts: Thomas Flangan falls somewhat into the latter camp. While this collection of pieces on Irish and Irish-American cultural figures he wrote for The New York Review of Books is often quite fine and imaginative, at times Flanagan is severely hampered by his inability to maintain a critical distance from his subjects, especially when it's someone he greatly admires, like John Ford or James Joyce or F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first two may be worthy of such high and unadulterated praise, but Fitzgerald? Even when dispelling popular myths about the latter, Flanagan has trouble reining in the gush, e.g. on THE GREAT GATSBY's status as a novel about the American Dream, Flanagan writes, "Scholars exchange their learned articles on the subject, and generations of college freshmen are told about it. If you whispered into a reader's sleeping ear the words 'Scott Fitzgerald's THE GREAT GATSBY,' she would murmur drowsily, 'and the corruption of the American dream.'"

There's a pretty unhelpful introduction by Seamus Heaney that's more of a personal memoir of Flanagan than a way to orient oneself with regard to Flanagan's writings.