The Holy City

November 10, 2008
McCabe (Winterwood
) delivers a claustrophobic indictment of failed peace and love, as seen through the eyes of a nut job Irish baby boomer. C.J. “Pops” McCool, the illegitimate son of a wealthy, married housewife, is raised by a surrogate mother in the “Nook,” a plot of land buried deep within his birth mother’s estate. However, when candy-striped blazers and the Kinks enter his world, McCool dives headlong into the swinging lifestyle, developing an unhealthy attachment to a Nigerian teenager and dating an older woman. As McCool’s cultural obsessions grow out of control, he acts on a taboo impulse and starts a chain of events that leads to his institutionalization. Nearly 40 years later, living with a doting wife, McCool attempts to reconcile his youth with his supposedly cured present state. At turns irate, mystified and nostalgic, McCool’s reminiscences stand as a haunting rejoinder to his youth’s groovy promise. McCabe’s dynamic and flawed antihero is a creepy delight, the perfect guide to some very dark material.

October 1, 2008
The bastard offspring of a married Protestant woman and her Catholic lover, retired dairyman Chris McCool spends his days recollecting people and events from the late Sixties. He thinks of Marcus Otoyo, a pious Irish-Nigerian Catholic youth, and a failed affair with Dolly Mixtures, a flirtatious Ulster Protestant beauty who inflamed the locals of Cullymore, a rural Dublin suburb, with her provocative dress and habits. Otoyo's mixed parentage, Dolly's religion and sexuality, and McCool's personal history suggest the cultural tensions that pervade his narrative. Through McCool, whose name ironically evokes the mythical Celtic hunter Fionn mac Cumhaill (anglicized as Finn McCool) as well as a campy Irish hipness, McCabe brilliantly describes a socially fractured, consumerist Ireland populated by aging outcasts from formally dominant clans as well as immigrants representing a globalized Irish middle class. McCool retreats from this world to the Happy Club, an imaginary realm he inhabits with his Croatian girlfriend, where they listen to soft-rock hits and buy vintage clothes on eBay. Fans of McCabe's previous work, especially "Breakfast on Pluto" and "Call Me the Breeze", will enjoy this weirdly absorbing and ultimately disturbing novel.J. G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2008
Chris McCool, former dairy farmer andperennial hep cat, isstill in lovewith the swinging sixties. He spends his days listening to Dusty Springfield, buying vintage clothing on eBay, and clubbing with his Croatian girlfriend. He grew up as the bastard child of a married Protestant and her Catholic lover in the rural Dublin suburb of Cullymore. As aresult of his emotionally damaged childhood, he embraced the sixties as a way to break free of his low social standing and tortured views on religion and sex.Dressed in crushed-velvet pants, driving a Ford Cortina, and carrying on with the flirtatious Dolly Mixtures, Chris thought he had found the perfect route out of his small, constricted hometown ways untilhe developed an unhealthyobsession with a pious Nigerian boy from the local Catholic school. McCabe slowly transforms his unreliable narrator from acampy Austin Powerslike figure to a sick creep with a violent streak. Thismesmerizing but unsettlingread will appeal to fans ofMcCabes Breakfast on Pluto (1999) andWinterwood (2007).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)