Brooklyn Book of the Dead

This is "the great Irish-American novel." While "The Great Gatsby" is a brilliant novel about America from an Irish-Catholic point of view and "A Confederacy of Dunces" has the most memorable Irish-American character in Ignatius Reilly, this book gets inside the soul of Irish-America and unmasks all its neuroses, obsessions and dreams. Stunning!

the romeoville critic who doesn't like difficult lives posted his/her dim review twice, thus pulling down the average ranking of this book. so, to keep things fair, i will post my opinion twice. michael stephens is a brave writer. he investigates complicated, sad, unrelentingly torturous relationships, and he doesn't give himself any easy ways out. he didn't have to do this, but he did, so we might as well learn from what he's investigated. to complain about his material is to leave unrecognized the accomplishment, and the gift, of charting this rough terrain for us. and his imagination kept me absorbed throughout.

Lyrical, poetic, raucous and for real is this Irish American novel whose Coole family chronicles the rise and fall of a family into Brooklyn being. Stephens is a poet, sentence to sentence, and painfully honest in a way most writers would fear to be. Questing out of the dregs for a mythos too, splendid indeed and his works will outlast the pulp fiction of our time from Joy Luck Clubs to the Joan Didion suburban pathos.