Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker

There are many reasons to read Homesick at the New Yorker. Among them, the book may be the only existing full-length biography of this talented and fascinating author. And Homesick at the New Yorker is well-written, indeed. But there are shortcomings to this account of Maeve Brennan's life. The review prior to this one speculates that author Angela Bourke may have found her subject illusive. And that may be the case. But what certainly is the case is that Bourke's resulting portrait of Brennan is somewhat blurred. Is it because Brennan moves out of scope of the camera just as the shutter is capturing the image...or is it that Bourke's camera itself is moving? I don't know for certain. But repeatedly, just as it seems we're homing in for some tasty detail or substantive level of depth, Bourke takes off in another direction, and the initial thread is dropped. Frustrating. The very restraint that makes Bourke's prose so neat and elegant may also serve to diminish the overall impact of the book. Often the author brings us close to gaining insight about Maeve Brennan, and then abruptly pulls down the shade, as if it would be too embarrassing for her, us, or Brennan, to see what would be revealed if she analyzed her subject a bit more closely. Brennan's relationship with her father comes to mind; it seems an extremely important and complex relationship, but beyond stating that fact, Bourke doesn't pursue it. What conflicts did it create? What are the implications for her work? relationships? etc. Perhaps the author figured she could drop the ingredients onto the pages and readers could bake up our own conclusions, but I'd like to have had a few of her *theories* served straight up. I have few if any theories on Maeve Brennan myself, but Angela Bourke must, after clearly having spent a great deal of time researching Brennan. Another example, Brennan's relationship with her husband. Bourke may be trying to be journalistic, keeping distance from her subject(s), but the result is basically: they did this, and then they did this, and then they did this, and someone said this about them--but not what any of that might *mean* or how it would foreshadow X, or how that was reminiscent of Y, or how it seems to have affected Z. I suppose what I am saying is the author seems to keep too polite a distance from Maeve Brennan. Finally, the review prior to this one also commented positively on Bourke's frequent mentions of Irish history, in context of Brennan's life. To me, Bourke's attempt to braid her own interests in Irish history, Irish nationalism, and Irish language movement into the narrative of Brennan's life seemed gratuitous and somewhat self-indulgent. There are entire passages that could have been edited out. Not that they weren't in some way interesting, but they had little or no bearing -- neither direct not distant -- on Brennan's life or work. Consequently, these references were distracting and ultimately irritating, rather than illuminating. P