Word: coffey
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...LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY (293 pp.) -Brian Moore-Atlantic-Little, Brown...
James Francis ("Ginger") Coffey has discovered the secret of eternal boyhood. He never faces facts. Born in Dublin "in humble circs" but now a status-seeking New Canadian immigrant, Ginger daily imagines his ship will come in even while he founders at some bar. With a flaming red mustache and a bluff military stance acquired in the Irish Army, Ginger leads his troupes of sentimental illusions and heroic reveries straight into the machine-gun fire of reality...
...Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne worried an old maid's wasted years in cruel whispers. In The Feast of Lupercal, he basted a 37-year-old virgin schoolmaster who knew less of sex than his students. While its plot is more forced than forceful, The Luck of Ginger Coffey dyes its boy-man hero in the rich Moore pigments of humor, poignance and irony...
...Canadian, Ginger Coffey is a swiftly self-unmade man. Jobless, he spends the $600 his wife Veronica had set aside for return passage to Ireland. When he finally confesses this, Veronica sobs, slams and locks the bedroom door and leaves Ginger to warm his imagination on two quarts of beer. Armed with false courage and the recommendations of a cartoonist friend named Gerry Grosvenor, Ginger applies to the Montreal Tribune to become a Gentleman of the Press. But brrrr-tongued Managing Editor MacGregor, nicknamed Hitler by his staff, believes in starting everyone at the bottom, proofreading the galleys...
Then Warren Burke came to the office of the county attorney to complain that his wife and four children, members of the sect, had disappeared, and he had a good idea where they were. Deputy Sheriff Ray Coffey went with Burke to the Full Gospelers' houses and found them sealed up, with newspapers over doors and windows, keyholes plugged, plastic covers over cooling outlets. Neighbors remembered the sounds of digging a while back, and it began to look as if the Gospelers had all gone underground...