Word: farragan
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...irreverent writer of baroque novels that raged with comic lunacy and roared through the conflicts of middle-class Irish and Italian Catholics; by his own hand (carbon monoxide poisoning); on March 30; in Pembroke Pines, near Miami. McHale won critical praise for his first novels, Principato (1970) and Farragan's Retreat (1971), but six subsequent novels never reached that early level of achievement...
...Catholics have been writers who were raised in the Catholic Church and left it, sometimes paroxysms of guilt. James Joyce's splendidly horrific descriptions of a Catholic boyhood in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man lent a certain romance to apostasy. In his novels Principato and Farragan 's Retreat, Tom McHale displayed a minor genius for the atmospherics of oppressive ethnic Catholicism. Among certain intellectuals, it is faintly disreputable to be a believing, practicing Catholic; a Catholic becomes spiritually interesting only in his repudiation of the faith...
...writing that can survive such pas sages deserves attention. Those who keep hoping that McHale.will return to the exuberant comedy and middle-class Catholic characters of his first two novels, Principato and Farragan's Retreat, will again be disappointed. McHale seems stubbornly determined not to repeat ear lier successes. In that respect, at least, The Lady from Boston succeeds. The novel will vex those who expect their reading matter to carry the freight of coherent meaning. Those who do not mind the voyeuristic experience of being interested but not concerned will find it a lot easier to take McHale...
Perhaps every good young writer should be allowed a book like this one. Still it is a notable disappointment. Three years ago, McHale published two exhilarating novels in quick succession: Principato and Farragan's Retreat. In both he revealed wild comic gusto, a youthful, vengeful rage at certain vagaries of the Roman Catholic Church, and a visceral knowledge of middle-class Irish and Italians around Philadelphia and the Jersey shore. McHale was never a stylist; he made up in energy what he lacked in elegance...
...FARRAGAN'S RETREAT, by Tom McHale. The Catholic piety and prejudices of a rich Philadelphia family done up with genial savagery...