Father's Day:
Connolly, Paul
FATHER'S DAT Eugene Kennedy Doubleday, $13.95, 488 pp. Paul Connolly IS IT yourself knows the meaning of "baloney"? The common notion is that it's a corruption of bologna. But I have it from me...
...There are too many shamrocks in the style and too much sham in the story...
...Baloney, blarney: whatever the Irish kiss, they have a way with words...
...So here's a book of balargny, and a large mouthful it is...
...But, we are told, "She waved a blarney-repelling hand at him as he passed...
...But I have it from me Irish uncle, Francis Griffith, that it's a pervasion of blarney by Brooklynites in the 1930s...
...Telling the tale is Austin Kenna, eighty years old, fifty of them in halter as professor and don at the University of Notre Dame...
...Tom's the spit and image of his father, old P. B. (" 'Powerful Bastard,' some said the initials stood for"), who parlayed a football scholarship under the Rock into a bit of bad business with the Chicago mob into a career as master-builder of Catholic schools and churches...
...If there is a lesson here about Irish American Catholics, it is that piety is their bride but power is their mistress...
...There is more than a hint of self-parody in the prose and more than a trace of cynicism in the depiction of Irish American Catholicism...
...The most troubling quality of this novel, finally, is that the blarney becomes manneristic and the irreverence is shoddy - cutting neither sharply nor deeply enough toward some deserving bones...
...Paul have used television if he were living today...
...About a third of the book flashes back to the father's career in the Depression and again World War II, thereby suggesting how the son inherits his father's lust for power...
...His brogue is as thick as Guinness, his pieties as old as potatoes, and his story concerns Father Thomas Kinsella, president of Notre Dame in 1983 (after Father Hesburgh "left for that big international job...
...Father Tom's torment is to decide whether there's most honor in being president of N.D., becoming cardinal archbishop of Chicago, or marrying an attractive, em-pathetic actress - three alternatives present to him throughout the story...
...Many readers will find themselves making a similar gesture...
...Woven through this main story are the troubles of other priests with alcohol, homosexuality, and the question: "Would St...
...Perhaps I should not ask for more than entertainment from a popular novel, but a professor of psychology and author of two dozen books on human nature might have drawn more than caricatures...
...Power has many meanings and many uses," says Father Tom, and the use of power is Kennedy's theme...
...The book is a good read but corny as beef and cabbage...
...At one point, the ambitious P. B. tries to have his way with an alderman's secretary, "lathering her up with so much flattery that she was slick enough to swim the English Channel...
Vol. 108 • September 1981 • No. 16
