Connolly's Life

By Ralph McInerny

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689113560
• ISBN13: 9780689113567
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Scribner
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Coulda Been a Contender

This is a very well written little tale about a celebrity liberal theologian/priest who invades a writer-friend's marriage, against the backdrop of Vatican II and its wake. The opening finds the priest just supposedly killed in a plane crash many years later. The writer -- his marriage annulled and living in Rome with a young mistress -- flies back to the USA for the funeral. And then, it seems, the dead man has been "sighted"; the rest of the novel is a bit of a mystery, a bit of a fable, a bit of social realism, a bit of a moral tale. There is not a bad note, the prose is smooth and colored. And it frankly just irritates me to have to take this book to task. There are few enough good pieces of literary realism by and about modern American Catholics, without some kind of axe to grind. Nevertheless, one must say this: here is a good novel that could not only have been great, but very great. The subject matter, the settings, the characters, and especially the issues are all here -- and invite Melvillian treatment. I am sure McInerny has the equipment to deliver. Yet only at about page 90 in this 145 page book does the lurch of the modern world tearing these people apart begin to be plumbed, and then only fitfully. Earlier on a friend of the wife "has an abortion" and then disappears without further comment; perhaps she had a cold. Other characters are noted to have "lost their faith" as if they had lost luggage at the airport. Perhaps this sort of treatment, itself, is meant to be some sort of wry comment on the utter vacuity of post-Vatican II American Catholicism, but its hardly clear. To all appearances McInerny is a happy adjusted guy, healthy and endearing; he ultimately decided to pursue detective novels rather than what we may a little self consciously call "literary fiction." He may not have enough hubris, either, to chase white whales or such. Well and good; but damn, what material was here -- he didn't even have to chase it! Who knows, perhaps some fire in the belly, and a certain degree of personal unhappiness is necessary to make a great novelist. One recalls what a happy fellow old Herman was with his best-selling south sea tales, before he met Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . . The business of reading literature, after all, is a little selfish. For my own sake, not good Professor McInerny's, I wish he would encounter a little of Hawthorne's ghost somewhere soon, to completely recast and expand this portentious tale before he goes old Connolly's way . . . . PS: this book is NOT a roman a clef about Malachi Martin, although old rumors about him may have inspired it. The character Connelly has no resemblance, and the text bears many traces of vetting by pricey fiction libel lawyers.