Wild Decembers

...Like Yeats's trained on turbulent sorrow, and her ferent feel when the two are alone to- Cuchulain, O'Brien battles with this gaze is fearless...

...In general, howDecembers are petty, cruel, jealous, greedy, source of personal and violent-and yet impossible to hate...

...Decembers reads at once like an intricate escape the sins of his father...

...ers that are hatched in the snows," and O'Brien has said...

...Nothing lighthard-bitten loyalties, and enduring hos- mountain...

...Her work has caused Joycean tempt at friendship, the two men, like far from humorless...

...When Molly Winans ritory itself reigns supreme, "fields that Bugler, on his fancy tractor, stakes his mean more than fields, more than life claim on the mountain, Joseph can brook orn in 1936 on a farm in and more than death too...

...the sight of it so thrilling up there in the growing weary from the effort...

...Characters in Wild and the persistence of ethnicity as a hint of divine passion...

...Indefatigably lyrical, she is Joyce's direct literary descendant...

...These characters wage battle after battle, and O'Brien never GREELEY'S WORLD simplifies their tangled, Byzantine motivations...

...his fury driving him to commit a foul Imagination For a rather slender "extended essay," crime, he pauses to watch a mare and Andrew M. Greeley The Catholic Imagination provides a good her new foal: "When he saw them so C6w~crsi(y of Cafifi)rnia Press, 524.95, introduction to Greeley's unique modus close together, his heart froze with a 198 pp...

...Working from two "representative headlong absence of reason he saw their ndrew Greeley has been writ- samples" of married Americans, for exlives return to normal, the pattern of the ing on the "Catholic imagi- ample, Greeley is prepared to demonsteady days as they had once been...

...A dark tale, told in singing prose callow land a road, sluicing the little Heartbreak and violence advance with fortresses of ash and elder, a crooked grinding inevitability...

...destruction of their life together to satiate his hatred, his "useless and aping belligerence...

...At one moment, they stand and sea-she has spent an impressive, proso many ways...

...The London Sunday Times has called O'Brien "the most disturbingly intense and intimate of writers...

...est book, The Catholic Breege and Bugler's love for each other Imagination, "there is a is itself a question without an answer...

...The villagers are a nasty remained the muse, as it did for Joyce...

...Joseph and bit as vital and vivid as the present-the B married at sixteen and fled Breege Brennan are brother and sister son of a past enemy must become a presto London, where she has living on a mountain in Cloontha, an iso- ent enemy...

...they sport "higher rates longs for the "pattern of the steady days," in his earlier works on the value of Cath- of sexual love because of the impact on and, at that moment, more than anything, olic schools, the centrality of parish life, them of the story of human passion as a we wish it for him, too...

...Like James Joyce, lated village, on a farm left them by their sessed by history and its grievances, whose biography she has written for parents...

...Each character is torn gether...

...A few scattered houses, the old fort, lime-dank and jabbery and from the great whooshing belly of the lake between grassland and Commonweal 1 9 May 5, 2000 their way with men-and in a discus- still, the very existence of Breege and Bu- it introduces is thrilling and clean...

...Indeed, the spool of the story unwinds Wild Decembers O'Brien combines this lyricism with a as in Oedipus...

...The novel inhabits familiar O'Brien helplessly as he loves his mountain, "the territory, a grim rural Ireland where ter- sacred fetters of land and blood...

...communal identity...

...His O'Brien never mutes their meanness, but sociological work, his she knows it comes from hurt...

...The entrancing rhythms and refrains, the density and chant-like, drumming fragmentation work on the reader like music, right from the very first sentences: "Cloontha it is called-a locality within the bending of an arm...

...And so it does stunningly in Wild Decembers...

...I believe," she has said, "that all prose should have the rhythm of poetry...

...siren sisters-witchy seducers who have copies and staging a bonfire...

...They are "flow- "Life is not a placid pool," Edna like Eudora Welty, only bawdy...

...operandi, blending stories, survey data, kind of agony at how outside everyone and a few memorable assertions guarand everything he felt, an outcast in the anteed to provoke double and triple takes world save for Breege, and he knew that among those unfamiliar with the style of by telling her that single shred of truth James T. Fisher this priest, sociologist, and popular novshe would not desert him, and then in a elist...

...Bugler wants his farm, look at a river...

...O Breege can't abandon either Joseph or emptiness, a deep amethyst-colored, her love for Bugler, facing violence on plashing river, clean and icy cold...

...In Molly Winans is director of publications at one side and humiliation on the other...

...Questions everyday life...

...in New Zealand and has come to Cloon- lot, entertained by other people's pain, O'Brien returns in novel after novel to tha to farm inherited land adjacent to the consumed by gossip, and eager to the source-the melancholic spirit, Brennans', on what Joseph calls "my pounce on the vulnerable...

...But O'Brien is tilities...

...Into their midst "The enemy is always there and these live in self-imposed exile-but Ireland comes Mick Bugler, who has been away people know it...

...Wild Decembers, the story of their love is the Kingswood-Oxford School in West HartJoseph loves his sister but risks complete this river-it comes from afar...

...A nation" since the 1970s, but strate not only that Catholics "enjoy" sex This ultimately murderous man just this motif was also implicit more than others...

...When novels, and his essays Breege's love for Bugler lands her in an all feature a conviction asylum, she encounters harrowing that Catholic "differhuman suffering and wonders, "Is it the ence" is rooted in a kind serpent...

...Joseph is a man utterly poslived ever since...

...Dark comic relief controversy back home, too, where her their ancestors before them, feud over takes form in an ecstatic dinner dance first novel, The Country Girls (1960), was fields...

...They live for their land and for trapped, ready to mistrust at every turn...

...Is it that we love too much...

...For him, the past is every rural Ireland, Edna O'Brien volves around a triangle...

...road to the mouth of the mountain...

...The story re- no trespass...

...It came as if from afar, lific career fighting "with the invulnerwants Breege, must fight Joseph, must wild and vigorous and whizzing, then able tide," and she shows no signs of welcome his New Zealander fiancee...

...As Greecome as statements, as if she knows they ley suggests in his latare unanswerable...

...After a brief, doomed at- hearted comes this way...

...sion in the village hair salon that reads gler's love gives us hope...

...she concentrates instead on evocative physical and emotional de- lurks, even if (as is perhaps often the case) tails...

...At the novel's climax, when Joseph they are not completely self-conscious sets out to seek his revenge on Bugler, The Catholic about these perceptions of enchantment...

...The hope ford, Connecticut...

...Or is of "sacramentality of it that we don't love at all...

...propensity among CathHappiness rarely enters in, and then only olics to take the objects tinged by dread-Bugler, already en- and events and persons gaged to a beautiful woman, has no rea- of ordinary life as hints son to court trouble with the immensely of what God is like, in shy sister of a man who hates him-and which God somehow Commonweal 2 0 May 5, 2000...

...the Penguin Lives series, she speaks of each other, Breege in an introverted way Everyone in Wild Decembers is trapped: writing as a calling that forced her to and Joseph insistently...

...Breege, despite fierce loyalty to where villagers let loose, thanks to two banned, her parish priest gathering her brother, falls in love with Bugler...

...It's a raging, storming Still, O'Brien's eye is most often O'Brien's prose takes on a completely dif- sea, which we're all in...

...The novel is a dirge that keens and lulls by turns...

...Joseph himpoem and a taut, suspenseful page-turn- self loves the ancient Greeks-almost as er...

...No mortal actions can alter Edna O'Brien masterly storytelling instinct, so that Wild what fate has decreed, and no son can Houghton Mifflin Company, $24, 259 pp...