The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction (review)

This is a vastly impressive survey of Irish American fiction ranging from the 1760s broadsides of Lawrence Sweeney down all the years to Alice McDermott’s novel Charming Billy (1998). To this second edition of a much-praised study, the author adds a chapter on 90s fiction.

Fanning reappraises hundred of texts, an archive that richly explores the evolving concerns of an ethnic group in America. Deftly drawing parallels between the concerns of the pre-Famine satirists, the didactic and sentimental novelists of post-Famine mass immigration, and the authors of domestic (and many other kinds) of fiction in the twentieth century, this book presents an extraordinary panorama in which all matters of concern to immigrants are constantly reworked and analyzed.

The study charts a kind of epic and, like the best epics, it boasts a trove of stories. In this grand cast of characters and their fictions, some stand out: the pre-Famine John McDermott Moore, the hapless clerk Charles James Cannon, the prolific Mary Anne Sadlier, the fiery priest Hugh Quigley, Finly Peter Dunne, the postwar novelist Edwin O’Connor and, from the current generation, Maureen Howard. Fanning places James T. Farrell at the heart of the tradition, as its greatest stylist and chronicler of working-class lives. He also has an ear for the striking tale, from Quigley’s The Prophet of the Ruined Abbey (1885), a ferociously nationalist faux-legend, to Maureen Howard’s dazzling Natural History (1992). Yet he reserves most respect for realist immigrant accounts.

Fanning wears his considerable scholarship lightly; thus the book is not dated even a decade after its initial appearance. As he allows, the rise of multiculturalism as an issue has changed how Irish American writing might be viewed by Americanists generally. At this critical juncture, one might critique this work for its focus on a single ethnicity, but Fanning constantly implies questions for further discussion. In its rediscovery of so many writers, this book offers countless avenues for research; it also constantly raises the issue of interethnic relations, which, one hopes, others will take up. As writers reinvent “ethnicity as liberating doubleness,” Irish American studies should participate in the debates on multiculturalism as an opportunity both to understand ethnic Irishness in the United States and to contribute to new models of ethnicity and minority culture. Fanning’s vivid survey provides both sourcebook and inspiration for such work.