Word: moynahan
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PAIRING OFF, by Julian Moynahan. The book masquerades as a novel but is more like having a nonstop non sequitur Irish storyteller around-which may on occasion be more welcome than well-made fiction...
...What Moynahan pretends to be writing this time is still another crisis-of-identity novel. His purported antihero, Myles McCormick, floats adrift and lost in the rare-books stacks of the Boston Free Library. (Moynahan once worked at the Boston Public Library...
Myles is one of those feckless mid-thirties adolescents whom employers classify as "Out of circulation" and women stamp "Overdue." Naturally, Moynahan can no more keep his attention on salvaging poor Myles than Myles can himself. Forever slipping away into puns and put-ons, the antic professor becomes cheerfully obsessed by the minor oddballs he invents...
Between these literary vaudeville acts, Moynahan vamps with stand-up monologues on the purpose of libraries and the function of the city planner. Or he stages set-piece black situation-comedy scenes, like Myles' forlorn pastoral picnic on the shores of Walden Pond, now carpeted with beer cans...
Sure, and when Moynahan ends a story, he ends it. But it's a pity he has to go through the formal motions of writing a novel at all. At its free-form best, Pairing Off is an Irish happening - as luckily disorganized as a good St. Patrick's Day parade...