![\"\"](\"http:\/\/irishexaminerusa.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Billy_OCallaghan-300x169.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“My Coney Island Baby”
\nauthor: Billy O’Callaghan
\npublisher: Jonathan Cape (UK), Harper (USA)<\/p>\n
Ireland has long been home \u2014 physically, culturally and metaphysically \u2014 to those with literary ambitions. Much of what defined the written avant-garde was created by Irish scribes such as Samuel Beckett, Flann O\u2019 Brien or James Joyce. But the public notion of Irish literature often seemed fixed in time, sandwiched between the Rising and The Troubles. Yet, Ireland has fostered many more generations of literary lights who are just as, if not moreso, disruptive than their predecessors.<\/p>\n
As one of Eire\u2019s new literary lions, Corkman Billy O’Callaghan experiments not only with form but also time and space. In his second novel, \u201cMy Coney Island Baby,\u201d O’C![\"\"](\"http:\/\/irishexaminerusa.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/my-coney-island-199x300.jpg\")
allaghan applies a skillful subtlety to make two outwardly ordinary characters and their interior lives engaging and derive meaning from their portrayals. \u201cThe Dead House,\u201d his debut novel, had already won him praise for how he used supernatural tropes to create a haunting story.<\/p>\n
This new book provides a sensitive look into two middle-aged lovers \u2014 who happen to be adulterers. Focusing on these two characters, with their spouses as background abstractions, O’Callaghan\u2019s Michael and Caitlin are two flawed individuals who had accepted each other’s imperfections while carrying on a 25-year affair. They\u2019re equally locked in their marriages and the confines of the hotel rooms in which they meet. In simple but elegant language, he presents an intricate look inside a relationship \u2014 and the moment when it all is about to change. The book makes no moral judgment on their affair; just that it… is. And considering its origins in what was once one of the most Catholic of countries, this book is a quiet a taboo-breaker.<\/p>\n
Evoking such established Irish authors as William Trevor and Colm Toibin, \u201cMy Coney Island Baby\u201d reveals, within the course of one day, the histories, tragedies and even touching moments that define these two lives who have been stitched together into one seemingly intertwined cloth. And though much doesn\u2019t happen outside, the notion of \u201cConey Island\u201d adds a further element to the landscape of the book and producing conscious or unconscious reference to ideations of the place, as a play land, a Lou Reed song and its nature as a popular oceanside tourist spot.<\/p>\n
And in the way it recalls repressed longings and melancholia, it harkens back to characters from Joyce\u2019s \u201cDubliners\u201d or Toibin’s \u201cBrooklyn,\u201d in which some of the principals sleepwalk through life without emerging as a free and whole beings. hat existential malaise populates these tomes and others with Celtic influences. Yes, they\u2019re adulterers and betrayers of those they’ve sworn to love (albeit getting married in the 20s) but from a novelistic point of view that only adds to the drama and tragedy of their lives \u2014 beautifully expressed by this fine chronicler of inner worlds.<\/p>\n