Word: mchale
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
FARRAGAN'S RETREAT by Tom McHale. 311 pages. Viking...
...motto, "Power perfected becomes grace," could have been invented to describe Tom McHale's novels about Irish and Italian Catholics in America. Humor is his forte-not satire but farce. No aberration is too grotesque to be included, no character too minor to be lampooned. McHale's comedy waves over chaos like luxuriant grass over a grave...
There are many young writers with healthy reserves of rage and chaos, some indeed with little else. What distinguishes McHale is not only the fertility of his invention but the humanity-remarkable in a writer of 28-that penetrates even his crudest caricatures...
Like the eponymous hero of McHale's first novel, Arthur Farragan is a man brought low by his very decency. Instinctively he is a lover rather than a hater, a fairminded, trusting man and an indulgent father. Despite superficial pragmatism, he never quite cracks the code that relentlessly governs life around him: that the truth is always the opposite of what it appears to be. For Farragan every encounter ends in shock; every shock releases in the author an almost Dickensian, genial savagery...
...McHale's Navy and the short-lived sitcom bearing his own name, made it obvious that he is, at best, a second banana. Knotts, the Milquetoast deputy sheriff on the old Andy Griffith Show, tried to make a virtue of his inability to sing, dance or string a show together. Opening night, Guest Anthony Newley pushed Knotts around and took command-a running gag that provoked a feeling of sympathy. But can other guests and the same gag make a season...