Colum McCann and the Aesthetics of Redemption by Eoin Flannery (review)

Eoin Flannery argues that although there "have been a number of survey and single-author publications within this field in recent years, none has produced entirely convincing and/or comprehensive perspectives on McCann's fiction." Many might argue that the lack of academic output concerning McCann is hardly sinful, but rather a consequence of the novelist's capacity to escape easy categorization. If Flannery is correct, then McCann surely deserves a more respectable place in the pantheon of contemporary, as opposed to merely "Irish," writers. The fact is that surveys of contemporary Irish and Northern Irish novelists overlook—or possibly, ignore?—McCann repeatedly. He has, after all, produced numerous works of fiction and has "garnered widespread acclaim, a generous haul of literary prizes, and secured a faculty position on the creative writing programme at CUNY's Hunter College."

To highlight the critical wrong of this purported provincialism, Flannery presents a well-written, thoughtful examination of McCann's utopian vision offering "a moment of hope" in McCann's "preoccupation with the ethical currency of the narrative act." Flannery's study is a fine first comprehensive study of the fiction, an engaging mix of close textual reading and a mélange of theoretical perspectives that shed light on McCann's fiction—even if McCann slips, eel-like, away from neat geographical identification (Irish? expat Irish? Irish-American?) and opts for fictive examinations of "migration, displacement, the durable currency of private stories, and racial politics," rather than more readily categorized topics. Flannery concedes that McCann is "not alone in engaging with the Irish emigrant experience in the US, but the manner in which McCann interblends and historicizes the Irish experience with that of other marginal communities provides an insight into a unique ethical and political vision in his work," a pursuit of the "redemptive possibilities in literary creation"—as evidenced in McCann's explorations of Roma oral tradition, multiple narrators, Nuryev's mythologization, 9/11's mythologizations, and layered personal and family histories that resonate into the future.

Flannery presents one of the strongest chapters when he examines McCann's Fishing the Sloe Black River (1994). He provides a careful, detailed, and deliberate examination of each story in McCann's first book in light of the author's early development of this "aesthetic of redemption," and his chapters scrutinizing McCann's three most recent novels—Dancer (2003), Zoli (2006), and Let the Great World Spin (2009). A bit formulaically, but respectably, Flannery opens each chapter with a thoughtful contextualization of each work. Whether engaging with postmodernist, postcolonialist, new historicist, or deconstructive criticism, Flannery is to be commended for masterfully reining in these perspectives for his own study, rather than turning McCann over to a singular theoretical perspective that discredits author and critic in the end. Flannery then capably examines McCann with this new lens (as determined by the subject matter of that particular work), covering these major works and their major characters, events, and movements.

Flannery's discussions of Songdogs (1995) and This Side of Brightness (1998) leave me wanting to read more. Flannery's writing here, and elsewhere in the book, is crisp, exacting, and thought-provoking in its vocabulary; also, those novels offer much more for the critic's diet than Flannery reveals. His discussions can be enriching and engaging, but glossing their events and characters obscures so much of McCann's fictional stratification. Does this suggest that a more extensive discussion by Flannery would have been difficult, or that McCann's fiction does not serve Flannery's arguments fully? Hardly. Maybe a more extensive discussion would have become redundant for Flannery—which, in turn, suggests that McCann's earlier novels may not have been as subtle and as suggestive as some of his later fiction.

Flannery's discussion of Zoli, in particular his justification for accepting McCann's examination of the other, rings hollow at times. Flannery acknowledges the ways in which the...