Word: connors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Famliy is not merely a sequel to The Last Hurrah. It's O'Connor's most thoughtful and most successful attempt yet in dealing with the tensions of the Irish-American family. It's also very funny...
...Connor has an exact ear for the boisterous and outrageous language that the Boston Irish use and his caricatures of prominent Bostonians, especially the one of a certain currently popular Lady Politician, "a great grotesque woman with a huge marshmallow face and a tiny bright red mouth," are subtle and droll...
...Connor's resolution of the crisis is amazing and somewhat frightening. Old Jimmy Kinsella is left raving, "What the hell has happened? What the hell has happened to my family...
Incidentally, O'Connor should have gotten rid of the two party hacks, Edso and Walshie, who float, without any apparent purpose, through the novel. O'Connor's main characters are witty enough and these two grotesques merely detract from the book. I suspect some profit minded editor at Atlantic-Little Brown urged O'Connor to thread them through All in the Family as a guarantee of high sales...
Massachusetts politics, despite the changes in campaign style, haven't changed that much from the old days, according to O'Connor. It may look different but it still is vicious. And the characters in All in the Family are far more explicit about what troubles the state than are any of the characters in the other books. After denouncing his brother's attempts at reform, Phil cries out to his cousin...