Family, Ireland, and Politics in Edwin O'Connor's All in the Family

When Charles Fanning wrote that Edwin O'Connor's 1964 novel All in the Family "deserves to be better known," he touched on a problem concerning the author's critical reputation in general.¹ With the notable exception of Edmund Wilson, O'Connor was never the critics' darling, and even in Wilson's case personal friendship may have tipped the magisterial hand.² For a time the reading public paid no heed to academic silence, however, especially during that heady year of 1956 when The Last Hurrah was the best-selling novel in the country and the most lucrative book in the history of the Atlantic Monthly Press. When O'Connor received the Pulitzer Prize in 1962 for The Edge of Sadness, some thought it was given retrospectively for the earlier novel. But many O'Connor fans had expected another Skeffington saga, and so the Pulitzer Prize novel remained overshadowed. O'Connor's fame ended there. The year 1964 saw the unfortunate I Was Dancing, both as a novel and as a play, and in 1966All in the Family—the last novel O'Connor would publish in his lifetime—received mixed notices as the pace of history and a changing readership began to pass O'Connor by. Two years later, O'Connor died suddenly at age forty-nine. For the remainder of the century O'Connor was largely remembered as a one-novel writer. As a small indication of that fame, only the three-word phrase, "the last hurrah," the title of his most famous novel, has been collected in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

Nevertheless, All in the Family does deserve another look for several reasons.³ First, although O'Connor's novels appear sealed against the intrusions of biographical inquiry, important fingerprints in the book reveal much about the author at that late stage of his career. Second, All in the Family is O'Connor's only work that depicts Ireland itself. In fact, two extended sections set in Ireland frame the novel. Finally, the novel marks its author's return to writing about politics after a decade away, even if O'Connor realized that, at bottom, he was not a political novelist. As his title indicates, he was a chronicler of the more intense passions of family politics, specifically those of assimilated Irish Americans who had moved far beyond the suburban "two-toilet" Irish.⁴

All in the Family may be narrated by Jack Kinsella, but its real subject is his Uncle Jimmy Kinsella and Jimmy's three sons. In the first chapter, set in the 1930s, eleven-year-old Jackie loses his unstable mother and younger brother in a drowning that was possibly accidental, but more probably a suicide-murder. After the tragedy the father and remaining son visit Ireland, where they stay at Uncle Jimmy's retreat. Uncle Jimmy is a rising Irish-American tycoon who boorishly scorns the native Irish; why he maintains a house in Kerry is a loose thread. That idyllic summer forges strong bonds between the semi-orphaned Jackie Kinsella and his cousins, especially the middle son, Phil. Thus ends the first quarter of the book.

For the rest of the novel, O'Connor fast-forwards thirty years to the mid-1960s. Jack and his cousins are now in their forties, have earned Ivy League degrees, and lead high-powered careers. Jack is a successful writer of thrillers. Eldest cousin James Kinsella is a jet-setting priest on numerous ecumenical commissions during the heady Vatican II years. Most of the attention centers on Charles, Phil, and domineering Uncle Jimmy, who had helped to engineer Charles's political career. After serving as a big city mayor, Charles has just been elected governor. As in all O'Connor's fiction, city and state are never named but they are clearly modeled on Boston and Massachusetts. When Uncle Jimmy refers to "that deadhead burg" of "cold codfish Yankees" and "cornball Harps," only Boston fits.⁵ Soon after the election euphoria Jack begins to notice trouble between the new governor and his most trusted advisor, older...