Word: connors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ONLY CHILD (275 pp.)-Frank O'Connor-Knopf...
...most difficult tasks a writer can undertake, to write the truth about himself and about his mother, Frank O'Connor has chosen to tell a plain tale that succeeds better as work of the imagination than most fiction. He writes out of that typical Irish condition, self-exile -O'Connor lives in Palo Alto, Calif.-but the pipes of nostalgia are muted. Indeed, his chosen adjective for the old sod is not "green" but "mediocre...
...story concerns the pitiful boyhood and youth of Michael O'Donovan (Frank O'Connor is a pen name) in a wet, ruined, pious and oppressed Cork slum. Young Michael was heir to every misery that could afflict a boy: bad teeth, bad eyes, failure and constant canings at school, disgrace in his first wretched jobs, and the horror of a miserly, sententious and drunken father. James Joyce's squalid boyhood in Dublin was a princely origin compared with the Tartarean depths of little Mick O'Donovan's life in Cork. Yet by some miracle...
...other miracle involves the saintly character of his mother, Minnie O'Connor, who from the time she left a church-run orphanage at 14 had known nothing but the life of a slavey, sometimes unpaid, in households selected by the nuns for Catholic respectability rather than the real virtue of charity. In telling the life of this simple, devout soul, her son avoids the curse of self-pity that afflicted even such masterly performers as Samuel Butler, Rousseau and Stendhal, not to speak of a swarm of modern confessionists. After writing his mother's life-partly, of course...
...industrial Massachusetts, where the need for skills is vital, the Labor Department's regional director of apprentice training, Hubert Connor, has only 4,000 in his apprentice programs...