When Irish Eyes Weren't Smiling

...In this sense, All Souls resembles Michael Gold’s 1930 autobiographical novel Jews Without Money, which depicts the grim life of Lower East Side Jews, complete with gangsters and drunks, prostitutes and pugilists...

...One of his brothers dies in a botched armored-car heist...

...MacDonald goes on to trace the family’s unhappy life in the projects— the deaths of his brothers and the other misfortunes...

...MacDonald’s mother, a proud redhead named Helen, is an accordion player with a penchant for country music who has just moved her brood of eight children—sans husband—back into her parents’ house...

...The anger at the government turned the neighborhood away from such local politicians as Senator Edward Kennedy, who was seen as a traitor, and toward George Wallace, who paid a high-profile visit to South Boston in 1976...

...The author is the son of an unwed mother...

...A third dies after leaping off the roof of the projects...

...But it is really much more than that...

...But where such books as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Malachy McCourt’s A Monk Swimming tell the story of the transition from Ireland to America, MacDonald’s book tells what can happen the next generation or two down the line...

...He paints in vivid detail a portrait of a neighborhood locked down under Whitey Bulger, who ran South Boston out of the back room of a liquor store...

...Well, unless he’s a minority or gay, I’m afraid there’s not much we can do...

...MacDonald’s South Boston is among the poorest neighborhoods in America, a “death zone” into which taxi drivers—black or white—refuse to venture...

...In his 1996 memoir While the Music Lasts: My Life in Politics, the Massachusetts Democratic politician William M. Bulger described the South Boston of his childhood as “a largely blue-collar area...

...Certainly, both Al Gore and Bill Bradley fit squarely into MacDonald’s critique of liberalism...

...Then he asked me if Steven, was, by chance a minority who’d moved into South Boston...

...At this point, you might think that All Souls is merely yet another grim tale aimed at reinforcing the liberal orthodoxy on welfare, race, and the inner cities...

...His story is already causing a stir in Boston, where MacDonald’s Seth Gitell covers politics for the Boston Phoenix...

...The South Boston of Michael Patrick MacDonald, however, is a place with few men working legally...

...Make no mistake, MacDonald is no racist...

...But after a series of fistfights and scuffles with local toughs, the MacDonalds settled in—only to be caught up in one of the greatest urban social experiments of the twentieth century: busing...

...Her father, an Irish-born dockworker with a cap and a brogue, is old-fashioned enough to tell her, “You’ve made your bed...

...MacDonald’s mother appeared on the television news wearing a button on Wallace’s behalf...

...Nope...

...But when MacDonald tried to enlist private charities and liberal groups in his quest to free his younger brother, falsely implicated in the death of another neighborhood youth, he found himself defined as a non-victim: While Steven was locked up in the Department of Youth Services, I called every organization in town that talked about violence and the police department’s reactionary ways in black and Latino neighborhoods...

...A second brother hangs himself in jail...

...MacDonald never goes so far, but his critique of the liberal establishment does seem to be that of the far left...

...Gold concludes his novel with the classic call for rebellion: “O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy...

...An older sister suffers severe brain damage when, after a binge of valium, speed, and cocaine, she also falls from a great height...

...Nonetheless, MacDonald’s book serves as a fascinating challenge to liberalism: Liberals, he writes, “never seemed to be able to fit urban poor whites into their worldview, which tended to see blacks as the persistent dependent and their own white selves as a provider...

...He recounts with zeal the attitudes of a black co-worker towards the charitable establishment: “plantations . . . with all these ‘house Negroes’ running around and fetching their coffee...

...The rapidly gentrifying neighborhood now has fancy cappuccino shops and more than its share of yuppies...

...He does not know his father...

...Neighborhood youths, like MacDonald, bore the brunt of the government policing: “The helicopters above my bedroom window woke me each morning for school, and my friends and I would plan to pass by the [Tactical Police Force] on the corners so we could walk around them and give them hateful looks...

...One guy listened for about fifteen minutes while I told him about the abuses in Steven’s case, until I said “South Boston...

...In 1996, he returned to South Boston after a fouryear absence, and he makes a point of contrasting the existence his mother led there with the one she leads in her new home in Colorado...

...You are the true Messiah...

...And MacDonald’s story raises questions that any politician addressing race in America must confront...

...The author also depicts the times the neighborhood protests turned into racial violence...

...His mother is beaten by the men she brings into her life...

...A fourth serves time on a murder rap until an appeals judge exonerates him...

...While she lacked money in both places, in the West she lives in a world without ethnicity or community feeling—and she becomes so desperate for a sense of what she left behind that she approaches a Colorado redhead to ask if he is Irish, only to be met with a wary stare...

...To the extent George W. Bush relies on the work of private charitable institutions for do-gooding, the Texas governor does as well...

...Its characters inhabit a rundown housing project and live in grinding poverty...

...The tale begins with a mother and eight children in the middle-class neighborhood of Jamaica Plain...

...Now lie in it...

...The irony of MacDonald’s story is that much has changed in South Boston since the events in the memoir took place...

...Similarly, MacDonald is no conservative...

...But when he decides to sell the house, Helen and her children are forced to find a spot in the Old Colony housing project, and MacDonald’s story begins in full...

...Crime and drugs are rampant, and the most popular neighborhood figure is not William Bulger but his brother James J. “Whitey” Bulger, a gangster who is now one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s most wanted fugitives...

...The book’s author is a white, Irish Catholic resident of South Boston...

...He goes out of his way in All Souls to demonstrate how much his neighborhood has in common with the black area of Roxbury...

...What makes the book significant, however, are not the neighborhood secrets MacDonald discloses, but the possibility it holds out for a new way to think and talk about race in America...

...Despite the pain he experienced growing up, MacDonald is still in love with his hometown...

...One gets the sense that he would like to see some sort of socialism in America to address the woes of whites and blacks equally...

...All Souls relates in great detail the almost ceaseless demonstrations and marches in the neighborhood in 1974...

...But the gritty saga of the South Boston MacDonalds should be read by anybody looking for a gripping and full account of poverty in urban America...

...We had our share of bars and bookies and sin, but the area then, as now, had the city’s lowest rate of serious crime...

...Though MacDonald doesn’t make the argument, All Souls suggests the possibility of calling for a class-based— rather than race-based—program of affirmative action...

...Upon their arrival at the Old Colony project, the MacDonalds discovered pro-IRA graffiti and shamrocks and the standard violent initiation into the community...

...Families were stable: a divorce was a whispered horror...

...publisher canceled book readings after neighborhood toughs, angry with MacDonald’s revelations, threatened to disrupt his appearances...

...All Souls would probably not have been possible without the current wave of books of Irish angst...