Pluck of the Irish

...Directly or implicitly through the saga, Carroll suggests his protagonist's lacks are the inevitable result of an incapacity to love truly, the corruption of power and a malignant destiny that is the peculiar curse of the Irish...

...Nor is he helped by a familiar supporting cast of social and psychological cliches...

...Starting practically from scratch as compared to the Socialists and Communists, they are fast overtaking them in the unions and workers' councils...

...Pluckof the Irish Mortal Friends By James Carroll Little, Brown...

...When Curlcy becomes Governor of the Commonwealth, he raises his amanuensis to his Council—a position Brady uses to obtain a pardon for Gennaro Anselmo, a minor Mafioso who avenged the earlier killings of Brady's hoodlum pals...

...Michael's almost total acquiescence fulfills his father's hopes, yet somehow also disappoints the old man, who shifts his attention to his clerical nephew, a rising son of Holy Mother Church...

...The extensive technical details—on guerrilla tactics, stock manipulation, sail-boating, Boston geography—albeit usually germane to the story, also seem self-indulgent displays of the author's expertise...

...With a last ingenious ironic twist, the disappointing son does indeed save his unsuspecting father...

...Mortal Friends is less than the sum of its parts...

...In focusing on Colman Brady and his family, he highlights the character and shifting fortunes of the Irish on the old sod and in the new land...

...Harvard...

...As it stands...

...Far more important, though, is the fact that Robert W. Kern helps uncover the truth behind the grand camouflage, so that the Spanish Civil War can be seen as it was, and not as others—some evil, some myopic— wish it to be seen...

...According to Kern, and I tend to agree, he was killed by a Nationalist sniper serving with Colonel Yague, the Francoist officer directing the assault on Madrid in November, 1936...

...Naturally, he marries a wasp...

...Jack McShane's climb up the ecclesiastical ladder provides opportunities for further revelatory vignettes about corruption in Rome—the Bradys always aim for the top—and a marvelous portrait of an ailing, alcoholic Cardinal Cush-ing, at his best playing simple parish priest with the home folks, or faux naif with a sophisticated member of the Sacred College...

...At the Harvard Tercentenary, the Brahmins exquisitely reinforce the point by denying the Irish chief executive the position of prominence at the ceremony and the Governor's traditional honorary degree...

...Not to worry...

...His bravery at a pivotal moment in Irish history starts the British exodus, but leads as well to de Valera's repudiation of the peace negotiated by Brady's charismatic friend, Michael Collins...

...As the country's economic crisis deepens, we may well find that Anarchism is neither buried nor even mortally wounded...

...Without denying his own heritage, Colman's poetic sensibility is drawn instinctively to wasp achievement, neatly represented in Louisburg Square: "The harmony of construction, purpose, use, history was what moved him...

...10.95...

...Drawn into the Irish rebellion—"I chose none of it...

...Despite the fact that his uncle lavishly greases the appropriate palm in the Vatican, Bishop McShane's brash ambition eventually ruins him...

...Army under Patton...

...This was a world in which all conflicts—architectural, cultural, esthetic—had been resolved...

...In capacity for malice the Irish are no match for subtle Sicilians, whether in the Cosa Nostra or the Curia...

...Above all, though, Carroll seeks to show the moral dilemmas that even the well-meaning man faces when doing the "right thing" leads to unexpected and finally uncontrollable evil...

...But the detailed description of Brady's motives and gradual moral degradation notwithstanding, the man himself remains, in the last analysis, unsatisfying...

...Senate subcommittee service...

...After a discreet gift offered to a well-placed bureaucrat, the Church finds it can give the match its blessing...

...Brady saw it as an image of his own hope for himself...

...Like the Brahmins, the brigands appreciate propriety, and prefer their money and power maintain a low profile...

...Later he attempts to prevent further bloodshed during internecine mob warfare, and again his good intentions lead to additional murders, including those of his friends...

...Brady soon finds that worse than the sufferings inflicted by the English are the betrayals and violence of his own countrymen...

...There the talented and ambitious recent immigrant becomes Mayor Cur-ley's right-hand man...

...Perhaps, but for these themes to have worked fully, Colman Brady should have been a more convincing character...

...Meanwhile, Michael Collins' tireless investigations into organized crime have revealed more than he wished to know about mob financing, and he almost does in the entire Brady bunch...

...Michael becomes a classic American Success, almost too much so...

...Curley, by contrast, finds his political power much diminished...

...Life is much more complicated than Art, however...

...607pp...

...Along the way, a number of historical personalities put in special appearances: Eamon de Valera, Michael Collins, Winston Churchill (a cameo role), Mayor James Michael Curley, Governor Alvan T. Fuller, President Abbott James Lowell of Harvard, General George S. Patton, Estes Kefauver, Richard Cardinal Cush-ing, and—of course—the Kennedys...

...Innocent, Brady has no choice except to accept impeachment...

...That is the knowledge of evil," he notes, "the righteous and the sinner alike get i( in the neck...

...Have you got all that...

...Although Brady has sold his soul to the Sicilian devils, he sees a chance for redemption, or at least respectability, in his son, Michael Collins...

...While most of this material is ingeniously deployed, and Carroll's interpretations are just cynical enough to be probable, the historical notes often seem potted, creating a lecture-hall lull in the midst of the action...

...In a classical reversal, Collins then leaves government to join the family business, and in a final example of Irish vs...

...Irish, the ruthless Bobby Kennedy blackmails Collins to perform a modern heroic service—spying—for both Kennedy and country...

...But his horizons are far wider, for the demigod of Southie is a buffoon on Beacon Hill and in Harvard Yard —the seats and symbols of real power: Brady knows he must move out of his mentor's shadow and win support of both the Brahmins and the North End Italians...

...Harvard Law...

...Neatly dovetailing several subplots, Carroll then has Anselmo make Brady an offer he can't refuse...

...Anselmo is by now Capo of the Boston Mafia and needs a frontman for the mob's enormous enterprises...

...He uses the Godfather's ill-gotten gains to found an insurance company that grows into a conglomerate...

...As he struggles to enlarge his influence, Brady at the same time tries to do justice in the Sacco and Vanzetti affair...

...I do not agree with Kern, however, that Spanish Anarchism was mortally wounded by the Communists during the Civil War, was buried by Franco, and cannot be revived now that Spain has become a modern industrial state with a large middle class...

...Where he had merely acquiesced to evil, Brady now fully cooperates with it, accepting the lucrative arrangement...

...the conflicts set loose by loss and loneliness and betrayal and even, once, murder, can be, if not resolved, held in an order and simplicity like what he beheld...

...The Anarchists were driven underground during the Civil War, but they continued their work surreptitiously throughout Franco's rule...

...Brady is forced to revenge and flight, with his son, to America...

...It chose me...

...Reviewed by Joseph Parisi Associate Editor, 'Poetry" Following the tested recipes of Haley, Doctorow and Puzo, with a pinch of Capote, James Carroll's ambitious family saga traces three generations of the Colman Brady clan over four decades—from Tipperary to Southie, Beacon Hill, and all around Bean Town...

...For all the convolutions of plot, the wealth of information and large cast of characters, the novel usually moves at a fair clip, particularly during the second half...

...Stung by this snub, caused in large part by the Overseers' suspicions of his corruption in the Anselmo pardon, Curley demands of his protege that he take the rap...

...Then he smiled, and repeated what is almost a cliche in Spain, "Aiee, at heart, all Spaniards are anarchists...

...With the several strands of Brady biography, the novel thus intertwines episodes from the Irish Rebellion and ensuing Civil War, the Sacco and Van-zetti case, vendettas of the Irish-Italian Mafia, Boston politics in the '30s, Senate subcommittees of the '50s, and Vatican II, among many other things...

...With his pride shattered and the hope of a brilliant political career forever ended, he leaves the high road...

...He learns from the old pol, and from his perch he makes telling observations about Boston politics and the aspirations and resentments of the American Irish...

...In the subsequent bloody Civil War, Collins is murdered, as are Brady's wife, brother and sister...

...and he decides to use his money to make sure his boy realizes the American Dream...

...For that we must be grateful...

...That said, I hasten to add that Carroll conveys far more than local color through his skillful mix of fiction and fact...

...real authority resides with the elite...

...They are only now emergAs recently as November 1976, when I was in Spain, a knowledgeable official of the Suarez government said to me without my asking: "It is astounding how the Anarchists reappear...