Brooklyn Book of the Dead

By Michael Gregory Stephens

Book Overview

In The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, Michael Stephens presents the most devastating vision of the Irish-American family since the nightmarish portrayals of Eugene O'Neill and James T. Farrell. Returning to their Brooklyn neighborhood for the wake and funeral of their father (Customs Inspector Leland Coole, aka Jackie Ducks, Little Lee, Crazy Jack, but remembered by his children as the old bastard), the sixteen Coole children talk and reminisce about their father and family; all adults now, their lives have been painful failures involving drugs, alcoholism, violence, petty crime, incest, and despair. Like any truly emotionally crippled children of a dysfunctional family, the Cooles rant with bitterness about their pasts but likewise romanticize their family, coupling an ability to analyze their plight with an utter inability to do anything about it. The novel is also the story of the decline of urban America and the story of third-generation immigrants who are both cut off from their roots and yet unassimilated into the illusory American melting pot. Stephens writes of all this with a passion and love of his materials. And he writes bravely because this is a book that will be attacked by those who believe in the mythical American family invoked by family-values politicians and wealthy evangelists. If Stephens has a message at all, it is that families are diseases made fatal by a cynical American society.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1564780376
• ISBN13: 9781564780379
• Release Date: March 1994
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

The greatest novel about Irish-America ever written!

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!

enthusiasm

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, for real is this Irish American.

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.