The Divine Ryans

Hilarious and scalpel sharp, Wayne Johnston's 1990 novel looks back at 1967, the awful year following the death of 9-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan's father. Narrator and stumbling hero, Draper Doyle battles the buffeting winds of his formidable relatives, the terrors of burgeoning sexuality and the mystifying appearances of his father's ghost. The Newfoundland Ryans, a viciously insular clan known throughout the city of St. John's as "Divine" for their plethora of priests and nuns, own a failing newspaper and a thriving funeral home. After his father's death, Draper Doyle, his 12-year-old sister Mary (a marvelous mix of awkward, kindly, petty and roguish adolescence) and their mother, Linda, are forced to move in with the family matriarch, Aunt Philomena, their own home sold to keep the Catholic-biased "Daily Chronicle" afloat. Also housed at Aunt Phil's is caustic and irreverent Uncle Reginald, whose house had gone into the maw of the "Chronicle" ten years before. Aunt Phil's siblings, the sanctimonious, sadistic Father Seymour and crippled Sister Louise, are frequent visitors and supporters of Phil's narrow-minded, humorless tyranny. Formidable Aunt Phil rules the roost with implacable righteousness, dragging Draper Doyle to strangers' wakes at the funeral home, dragging her sister-in-law to the cemetery. She celebrates her own widowhood and Linda's too, saying, "He's free now...free from the marriage bed." Early on, she announces that Draper Doyle will forego his beloved hockey to become one of Father Seymour's "Number," a group of 100 orphans who sing in a chorus, tap dance and box. A fanatical Montreal Canadiens (Habs) fan, Draper Doyle plays goal because he can't skate well enough to be anything else. Unfortunately, he's not much of a goalie either. "I subscribed to the little-known dodge ball school of goaltending, which was founded on the economy of pain principle, which stated that if it would hurt more to stop a shot than to let it in the net, you should let it in. In short, I played as if the point of playing goal was to keep the puck from hitting me." But Father Seymour has no intention of spoiling his Number with untalented Draper Doyle and shunts him aside while compelling him, nevertheless, to attend practices. Bored and miserable, Draper Doyle finds some solace in his Uncle Reg's sessions of "psycho-oralysis," "the opposite of psychoanalysis." Uncle Reg institutes the sessions because of his nephew's frequent nightmares and sighting of his father's ghost, always with hockey puck in hand. "He told me the job of an analyst was to listen while the job of an oralyst was to speak. The job of an analyst was to take his patient seriously. The job of an oralyst was to make him laugh." The oralyst can lie, veer off on irrelevant tangents and have fun at the patient's expense - literally. Since the sessions will cost him half his allowance, Draper Doyle asks if they will do him any good. " `You should consider yourself lucky,' he said.

I picked this book up mainly for the name and intriguing cover (yes, you can pick a book by the cover!). Inside was a look into a child's life, reminding me of Angela's Ashes... this poor child suffered at the hands of his relatives and lineage. I probably wouldn't read it again, but I will pass it along to my friends who read.

I found this book quite intriging. In the spirit of "American Beauty", it is a tale about a dysfuntional family. It is told as almost a bitter sweet memoir of a real person's childhood in Newfoundland in the 1960's. You learn to dislike and like the different characters in the childs eyes and see how his divine family has truely fallen from grace. The characters in the book that should be the most devout and true are the most ignorant and irritating, these people being the preist and nun in the family. The leader of their Irish-Catholic, you could almost say cult, is the aunt of Draper Doyle (the young child). She is the most nauseating character I have yet to come across. She is filled with Hipocrisy and all the things that she is against. She also threatens the safty of Draper Doyle's newly widowed mother. Their entire future depends on Draper Doyle's recognization of his nightmares which cause him unbelievable embarassment in the face of his relative. His only refuge from his devout aunts and uncles is his uncle reginald who is one of the most endearing and genuinly funny characters I have come across. This book is fantasticly written (unlike this review, I have need of spell check) and keeps your attention from one paragraph to the next which is always a Divine thing in a book.

This book was pure enjoyment. A great read and never disappointing. Very different from Colony of Unrequieted Dreams. I feel as I have found an author that I will able to follow for years to come.

If you are Canadian, know anything about hockey or love oddball families, you will enjoy this book. It is the touching story of the Ryan's, a Catholic family in Newfoundland who run the local Catholic newspaper. The trials and secrets of this lovely bunch of nuts, as seen through the eyes of their youngest member, is a truly memorable story.