Family Fun

ANOVEL ON AN UNUSUAL subject presents its author with a large problem: how does one prevent the subject from taking over the whole book?-Foggage.Patrick McGinley's third novel, features the incestuous love of a twin brother and sister living in the Irish country side. Luckily for the reader. McGinley is to skillful to allow the incest itself to absorb the story. His matter-of-fact treatment of the details of their love and a well-crafted plot keep the story from being bogged down by free-floating sentiment or shapeless descriptions of characters. McGinley's polse, skill, detachment, and emotional thoroughness make this novel, remote through it is from American experience, an excellent story.

The story acquires its reality and interest from clear and unembarrassed narrative. Kevin Hurley lives with his twin sister Maureen on a farm which very few people visit: their mother is dead and their father. now senile. is dying in the upstairs of the family farmhouse. Kevin and Maureen have been lovers for many years. McGinley. establishing the nature of their relationship in the first chapter, says:

Maureen was the flickering flame that radiated what warmth he had in his life. She was his twin, a big handsome woman with a big freckled face, heavy underlike breasts, thick thighs, and a bottom that overflowed the edge of the chair when she had down... She was an earth girl, assiduous in bed and equally assiduous in the farmyard.

The inseperability of the barnyard and the bedroom make the novel even more realistic. Kevin has always rendered his relationship with his sister as perfectly natural: even if it does not always seem perfectly so, he can make a pretty articulate defense of it. He says:

It's a pity we've been born before our time. In a few hundred ears incest will be as common as ditch water and as dull. too. You see, when they first started in breeding cattle, the Holy Marys said it was incest, that it was against God's law. But the farmers won the argument. They said that they were breeding best to the best, a good bull to his sister or even to his mother.

Uncertain of God's nature or existence, Kevin Justifies sleeping with his sister on the grounds that she is "a woman in need."

McGinley. however, does not lose much time in exploring metaphysical issues. The problem he presents in the very first chapter is the need to find a man who will appear to be the father of Maureen's unborn child. Kevin calls on his best friend, Murt Quane, and invites him over to the Hurley's farm. Tragically. Quane pulls into the Hurley's yard while Kevin is felling a tree; Quane is crushed by the falling trunk. One of Kevin's other friends, the misogynist veterinarian Festus O'Flaherty, arrives safety on the far but will have nothing to do with Kevin's sister. Kevin and maureen resort to hiring Billy Snoddy, a working man who was Maureen's only other childhood boyfriend, to play the part of surrogate. Snoddy is a thoroughly creepy character who, after discovering Kevin and Maureen in bed together, can only relish his knowledge and position. He becomes more noxious to Kevin when Maureen learns that her pregnancy was a false alarm.

Kevin's own marriage only complicates the picture. Feeling the need to establish a better life. Kevin courts and marries Murt Quane's bookish sister Elizabeth. The decisiveness of this marriage and the impossibility of keeping both Maureen and his wife force Kevin to decide where and with whom he will live. At the same time he must protect himself against the machinations of Snoddy and the vengeance of an imagined God. The prevalence of sickness and death in those around him, while completely natural, convinces Kevin that God's wreaks His vengeance for his sin by making innocent people around him suffer.

McKinley's thoroughness and control of plot are marvelous. Up to the last chapter, the fate of his characters is in doubt. And although it is possible to see the novel from a purely moralistic views, the tone is never preachy or unnecessarily gloomy; McGinley shuns intellectual, moral, or narrative pomp. Rather, what is most striking in this work is the verisimillitude of the feelings he ascribes to his characters. For example, just after his marriage, Kevin tries to ease out of his relationship with his sister, who still wants to sleep with him. However, McGinley poignantly describes Kevin's problem with remaining faithful to his wife:

He had no childhood memories of Elizabeth. Sex with her lacked the old association. In bed with Maureen he would imagine her as a girl climbing a tree in the Grove with pink winceyette knickers down to her knees. But in bed with Elizabeth he had to live in the thinness of the present.

If the premise of the story is unusual, and if the lives of his characters are more eventful than our own. McGinley realistically conveys their reactions to their own peculiar situation.

A specifically Irish penchant for black humor mainfests itself in McGinley's novel, though he manages to keep it under control. After Elizabeth's and Kevin's marriage. Elizabeth explains her initial timidity on sexual questions as the result for her being raped by an English journalists, McGinley writes:

"You don't understand," she said. "It was not my fault. I was raped by an English journalist called Alexander Utley, and when it was all over he told me that it was only symbolic, that he was re-enacting the Tudor conquests of Ireland. Do you believe me, Kevin?"

"I do," he said for the second time in a week. "but there are those who wouldn't."

The reader feels much the same way at the close of this suspenseful and masterful little novel.